Adding Plavix to the standard anti-clotting medication for heart attack patients can help keep arteries open and reduce deaths.

    WASHINGTON, March 9 (Xinhuanet) -- Adding Plavix to the standard anti-clotting medication for heart attack patients can help keep arteries open and reduce deaths, researchers said Wednesday.

    Researchers attending an American College of Cardiology meetingheld in Orlando, Florida, said the new strategy is the first big advance in heart attack care in more than a decade.

    Two large-scale international studies tested the safety and effect of Plavix in treating major heart attacks. They showed Plavix can help prevent the reclosing of the artery and a consequent second heart attack, which occurs in about one-fourth of heart attack patients given medications to dissolve the clot that completely or almost fully blocks the coronary artery.

    About one third of heart attacks are caused by such blockages of a coronary artery.

    Plavix, whose chemical name is clopidogrel, has been sold by Sanofi-Aventis and Bristol-Myers Squibb Co., which funded the studies.

    One study in North America and Europe involved about 3,500 men and women who were treated within 12 hours of reaching the hospital with severe heart attacks caused by complete blockages ofa coronary artery.

    All patients received standard anti-clotting medications including clot-busting drugs, and aspirin and heparin to prevent new clots. About half also took daily doses of Plavix, while the others got a placebo.

    Angiograms within about a week after the drug treatment showed 21.7 percent of the placebo group still had clogged arteries, diedor suffered a second heart attack, compared with only 15 percent in the Plavix group.

    This means that Plavix plus standard medications reduced the risk of death or a second heart attack by 36 percent, said lead researcher Marc Sebatine, of the Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, Massachusetts.

    In the other study, which involved about 46,000 patients in China, the risk was 9 percent lower in the Plavix group than the placebo group.

    "The treatment was very effective and very safe," commented Zhengming Chen of the University of Oxford in England, who led theChinese study. Enditem