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A nationwide program to get faster treatment for people with the most severe kind of heart attack has dramatically reduced the time between hospital arrival and lifesaving angioplasty.

More than three-quarters of people with STEMI heart attacks — so called because of the electrocardiogram pattern that shows major blockage of a heart artery — were receiving artery-opening angioplasty within 90 minutes of reaching a hospital in 2008, said a report released online Wednesday in advance of print publication Dec. 15 in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology.

Before the campaign began, in 2005, only half of those patients met the 90-minute deadline recommended for emergency angioplasty.

“It is a remarkable leap in performance, a tangible improvement in how people are being treated around the country,” said Dr. Harlan M. Krumholz, professor of medicine at Yale University School of Medicine and an author of the journal report.

When the American College of Cardiology and 38 partner organizations set up what is called the Door-to-Balloon (D2B) Alliance, there were doubts that it could succeed, Krumholz said. The name is based on the angioplasty procedure, in which a thin, balloon-tipped catheter is threaded into a blocked heart artery, and the balloon is expanded to restore blood flow.

“There were warnings that we were setting up a situation where we all could fail,” Krumholz said. “But all of a sudden people were saying, ‘We can do this.’”

The report on 831 hospitals showed the 90-minute door-to-balloon deadline for STEMI heart attacks being met in 52.5 percent of cases in 2005. That number increased to 76.4 percent of cases in 2008.

And the improvement has continued, said the American College of Cardiology. Its most recent data, from June 2009, shows 81.7 percent of patients getting 90-minute door-to-balloon time. Also, the average time for start of angioplasty decreased from 121 minutes in 2005 to 80 minutes in 2009.

“I think we can say that in this country, the speed with which you are treated for a heart attack has improved no matter where you are,” said Elizabeth H. Bradley, professor of public health at Yale and lead author of the journal report.

And while the study does not measure the effect of quicker treatment on outcome, “in the past couple of years, several studies have shown that reduction of door-to-balloon time is associated with improved patient survival,” Bradley said.

Most of the changes prompted by the program were simple: Having ambulance attendants call the hospital to alert them that a heart attack victim was on the way, alerting the catheterization laboratory where angioplasty is done and the interventional cardiologists who do the procedure to be ready to go to work, and getting the patient to the catheter laboratory as quickly as possible, Bradley said.

But a key ingredient was a change in the mindset of the hospital personnel dealing with heart attacks, Krumholz said. “The important thing is that everyone felt they were working hard and fast before this,” he said. “But the numbers showed they weren’t. Then people came together and reworked the process by which these procedures were done.”

Data on how much the program has improved survival might not be easy to obtain, because statistics do not separate out STEMI heart attacks — “the crushing heart attacks that kill you,” Bradley said.

But overall figures show “a marked reduction in heart attack mortality over this period,” Krumholz said, and it can be assumed that the D2B program has a role in that reduction.

Women who take low-dose aspirin to protect their heart might be helping their eyes as well.

A new study by Harvard University researchers found what they described as a modest benefit for aspirin in preventing age-related macular degeneration (AMD), an eye disease that destroys sharp, central vision.

“The data indicate that long-term treatment with low-dose aspirin has no large beneficial or harmful effect on risk of AMD,” said the study’s lead researcher, Dr. William G. Christen, an epidemiologist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston and an associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School.

“But, the data could not rule out a possible modest benefit,” he said.

Researchers have been looking at aspirin to see if it helps or hurts the eyes. Some believe its blood-thinning quality would be helpful in letting more blood reach the capillaries in the eyes. But others have proposed that, in a common form of AMD called wet AMD, in which blood leaks in the back of the eye and results in rapid vision loss, aspirin might increase the risk of bleeding.

For the study, reported in the December issue of Ophthalmology, Christen’s group collected data on 39,421 women who took part in the Women’s Health Study, which originally focused on heart disease and cancer. None of the women had AMD. They were randomly assigned to take either low-dose aspirin or a placebo.

During the next 10 years, 111 women who took aspirin developed AMD, compared with 134 women who took the placebo. That equates to an 18 percent lower risk for AMD among those who took aspirin, “but the rate difference was not statistically significant,” Christen said.

Dr. Stephen G. Schwartz, an associate professor of clinical ophthalmology at the University of Miami’s Bascom Palmer Eye Institute, said there have been similar results with aspirin in other eye diseases, such as diabetic retinopathy.

“This also fits in with common clinical experience,” he said.

However, Schwartz said he did not think that people should be taking aspirin to try to prevent AMD. The fact that aspirin had little or no effect on AMD is good news, he said.

“If you need to be on aspirin, you should take it and not worry about AMD,” he said. “If you don’t need to be on aspirin, you probably shouldn’t take it.”

Another report in Ophthalmology found that common cholesterol-lowering drugs called statins do not stop advanced AMD.

The study’s lead researcher, Maureen G. Maguire, from the department of ophthalmology at the University of Pennsylvania, said in a prepared statement that the data “did not support a large effect for statins in decreasing advanced AMD risk in patients who already had large drusen in both eyes.”

Drusen are whitish deposits, commonly found in the eyes of people over 60, that could be a sign of AMD. People who used statins were at slightly higher risk for developing advanced AMD than were non-users, she said.

Pregnant women who are poor are more likely to deliver a very preterm baby than more affluent women, even though both groups typically receive equal care, a new British study shows.

The University of Leicester research team said their findings show the need to learn more about the association between economic status and preterm birth.

For the study, the researchers looked at 7,449 very preterm infants and calculated a “deprivation score” for each infant and mother. They found that mothers from the most deprived areas were nearly twice as likely to have a very preterm infant (less than 33 weeks’ gestation) than mothers from the least deprived areas. In addition, the number of infant deaths due to very preterm birth was nearly twice as high in the most deprived areas.

However, according to the report published in the Dec. 2 online edition of the BMJ, all of the very preterm infants had similar survival rates and levels of neonatal care. So, while there are socioeconomic-related disparities in preterm birth rates, deprivation doesn’t appear to be a barrier to accessing and receiving neonatal care.

This indicates that gaining a better understanding of the link between deprivation and risk of preterm birth should be a major research priority, the study authors said.

“It seems highly likely that such work could lead to public health strategies that would reduce the costs not only of neonatal care but also attached to the long-term health problems suffered by some of these babies,” they concluded.