Another important finding of this study is that patients who
did not report having dyspepsia and/or nausea and vomiting
during the incident were more likely to arrive later at the hospital,
similar to the results indicated by other researchers. More
specifically, Perkins-Porras et al.
(2009) showed that the majority
of patients with less than three non-typical symptoms of AMI
arrived at the hospital 2 h after the onset of the AMI-related
symptoms, and Herlitz et al.
(2010) mentioned that nausea and
cold sweat are associated with shorter decision time.
Obviously,
the presence of non-typical symptoms such as dyspepsia or
nausea/vomiting significantly increases the feeling of discomfort
to patients with AMI, which results in their early arrival at the
emergency department. So, the early recognition of symptoms,
especially non-typical ones, may probably encourage the patient
to seek healthcare services and shorten the time delay in receiving them. Therefore, the pattern of symptoms had an important
role in pre-hospital delay in our study population.
As a result,
future studies investigating how patients appraise symptoms of
AMI may help in the development of more targeted interventions.
Those studies should be focused on factors and personal
beliefs that could affect the ability of patients to recognize the
symptoms of AMI as threatening, especially the non-typical
symptoms.Moreover, this study poses the necessity for the development
of well-structured educational programmes and interventions
for the general public by specialized healthcare
professionals so as to provide information and educate high-risk
groups in the early recognition of non-typical symptoms of AMI
and the importance of non-delayed hospital arrival (Giugliano &
Braunwald 2003).