Does reducing door-to-balloon time improve in-hospital mortality in patients with ST-elevation myocardial infarction undergoing primary percutaneous coronary intervention?
Successful implementation of efforts to reduce door-to-balloon time in STEMI patients has not translated into the expected improvements in in-hospital survival.
There has been a dramatic reduction in median DTB time and increased compliance with the related national guideline. Despite these improvements, in-hospital mortality was unchanged over the study period. Our results suggest that a successful implementation of efforts to reduce DTB time has not resulted in the expected survival benefit.
Flynn et al. (Mon,) studied this question.