Kathy Burks thought she was too young and too active to have a heart attack.
"I just sat down. I just dialed 911, and at that time my hand just kind of went numb. I said it's something with my heart because my chest has just never hurt like that before," she said.
Her artery was blocked. Standard treatment: angioplasty, a balloon reopens the artery.
But a sudden rush of blood into a reopened artery can damage the heart muscle.
"It turns out that how patients do after a heart attack is largely dependent on the final size of the heart attack or the damage that is incurred on the muscle," said Dr. Habib Samady, Interventional Cardiologist at Emory University.
Now cardiologists are testing a new technique called stuttering, which involves inflating and deflating the balloon several times.
"Our idea is to restore this blood flow in a stuttering fashion to make the muscle accept the fresh blood in a way that won't cause that much damage," said Dr. Samady.
Studies show stuttering reduces injury as much as 50 percent.
Two months after the procedure, Kathy is setting her own recovery pace and heading toward a healthier future.
The stuttering procedure was developed several years ago at Emory University and has been tested in small studies in France, Israel, Denmark and Canada.
Studies involving patients in the U.S. are still in progress.
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