New Delhi. Ten percent of the heart attacks in the emergency room are over diagnosed. Minutes matter with these patients and doctors have to act quickly in this setting. This 10% false positive rate is acceptable. This was stated by Dr K K Aggarwal, President, Heart Care Foundation of India.

Heart attacks which are common near Xmas can also be missed as the ECG can be normal in the first 6 hours. Every effort should be taken to reduce the number of false positive or false negative diagnoses of heart attack, said Dr K K Aggarwal quoting a study published in the issue of the Journal of the Medical Association.

In the study Henry and group studied the medical records of 1,345 people treated for suspected heart attacks in a regional system between 2003 and 2006, looking at emergency room decisions.

All the patients were suspected of having a STEMI heart attack, characterised by a specific electrocardiogram pattern. It turned out that 187 of them (14%) did not have obvious blockage of a coronary artery, with (11%) having negative results on cardiac biomarker tests.

There was a significant difference in survival with 4.6% 30-day death rate for those with a blocked artery and 2.7% for those without blockage. During Xmas most senior doctors maybe on vacation making the situation further bad for the common man.