Get well soon, zews!

Yesterday some scary news surfaced from South America as Wilton "zews" Prado announced that he was recovering from a heart attack at a local hospital in Brazil.

A heart attack, or myocardial infarction in medical terms, is the result of an inadequate supply of oxygen to the muscle of the heart for an extended period of time, resulting in death of muscle cells in the heart. Often times, people with chest pain may have ischemia, which is also the result of inadequate oxygen supply to the heart muscle, but can be reversible.

Thanks to modern medicine, so long as the symptoms of a heart attack are recognized quickly and access to an appropriate facility is readily available, effective treatment is available in the form of percutaneous coronary intervention, or PCI. What that means is that a cardiologist can go through the skin, usually in the arm or wrist, but sometimes the groin, to trace a tube called a catheter up to the heart. From there an angioplasty, like zews mentioned in his tweet, can be performed, where a small balloon is extended through the catheter tube and inflated to reopen the blocked blood vessel while also removing some of the blockage. Sometimes cardiologists will leave little metal tubes called stents at the site of the blockage to prevent the vessel from collapsing and blocking blood flow again. At this time it isn't clear whether that was done in zews' case.

Prognosis, or outlook after a medical event, of a patient who had a heart attack is largely dependent on the severity of cell death in the heart muscle. With limited information about the case, it is not easy to tell what zews' road to recovery will look like, but so long as he adheres to the advice of his highly-trained medical team he should be able to attain the best result possible for him.

Dust2.us deseja-lhe uma rápida recuperação meu amigo.