Delayed Angioplasty Postconditioning in STEMI Patients

The investigators previously reported that angioplasty postconditioning reduces infarct size (cardiac enzyme release) in STEMI patients with a fully occluded coronary artery at hospital admission. Animal studies have suggested that the time window for applying brief episodes of ischemia and reperfusion aimed at triggering postconditioning's protection is very narrow, i.e. does not expand beyond 1 minute after reflow. We sought to address whether this window might be larger in humans, i.e. whether STEMI patients might be protected several minutes after undergoing spontaneous reperfusion before admission coronary angiography.

Therefore, STEMI patients (onset of chest pain less than 12 hours) with a TIMI flow grade > 1 were eligible for that study. Angioplasty postconditioning was completed as already published and infarct size was assessed by measuring cardiac enzymes release.