[The clinical care pathway of patients with chest pain].

Chest pain is a common general practice presentation that requires careful diagnostic assessment because of its diverse and potentially serious causes and its evaluation remains challenging. The proportion of patients presenting to the emergency department because of acute chest pain appears to be increasing. Nowadays, the essential chest pain-related issues are the missed diagnoses of acute coronary syndromes with a poor short-term prognosis and the increasing percentage of hospitalizations of low-risk cases.

[Primary angioplasty in acute myocardial infarction: experience and results in the first 1,000 consecutive patients].

Background: One of the biggest debates in modern cardiology regards the relative merit of primary percutaneous transluminal coronary angioplasty (PTCA) versus thrombolysis for the treatment of acute myocardial infarction with persistent ST-segment elevation. After the excellent results with primary PTCA in trials and meta-analyses, the next question is whether such results might be duplicated in "real world" conditions.

Methods: Between January 1995 and April 2003, 1000 consecutive patients with acute myocardial infarction, out of 2272 (44%) with ST-segment elevation admitted to the coronary care unit at the Cardiology Department of the S.