What is the target door-to-balloon time for percutaneous coronary intervention in STEMI?

What is the target door-to-balloon time for percutaneous coronary intervention in STEMI?

• A. 60 minutes
• B. 90 minutes
• C. 120 minutes
• D. 180 minutes

Answer: (B)

In STEMI, every minute counts because myocardium is at risk of irreversible damage while blood flow is blocked. The goal is to restore blood flow as quickly as possible with primary PCI, and the target door-to-balloon time is ninety minutes or less. This means the interval from when the patient arrives at the hospital to the moment the balloon is inflated to open the blocked vessel should be under ninety minutes. Staying within this window has been shown to reduce infarct size and improve survival compared with longer delays. Why not the other times? A sixty-minute target would be ideal and would push systems to be even faster, but deferring to a realistic standard, ninety minutes is the widely adopted benchmark that accounts for typical hospital workflows, activation of the cath lab, and potential transfer times. Delays extending to one hundred twenty or one hundred eighty minutes are associated with significantly worse outcomes due to prolonged myocardial ischemia.

In STEMI, every minute counts because myocardium is at risk of irreversible damage while blood flow is blocked. The goal is to restore blood flow as quickly as possible with primary PCI, and the target door-to-balloon time is ninety minutes or less. This means the interval from when the patient arrives at the hospital to the moment the balloon is inflated to open the blocked vessel should be under ninety minutes. Staying within this window has been shown to reduce infarct size and improve survival compared with longer delays.

Why not the other times? A sixty-minute target would be ideal and would push systems to be even faster, but deferring to a realistic standard, ninety minutes is the widely adopted benchmark that accounts for typical hospital workflows, activation of the cath lab, and potential transfer times. Delays extending to one hundred twenty or one hundred eighty minutes are associated with significantly worse outcomes due to prolonged myocardial ischemia.