A New Concept in Producing Experimental Myocardial Infarction: Intracoronary Application of Thrombin

Recent studies in patients with acute myocardial infarction have shown that occluding coronary artery thrombi can be lysed by local application of streptokinase into the infarct-related coronary artery [9, 17, 22]. Significant improvement of local and global left ventricular function occurred in patients after successful reperfusion in the early stage of myocardial infarction [23]. Experimental studies, however, yielded contradictory results. Some authors found improvement [4, 16, 19], others no change [6, 7, 21] or even deterioration of left ventricular function early after reperfusion [3, 15, 18].