Drugs as good as stents for many heart patients.
By MARILYNN MARCHIONE
The Associated Press—story
from WashingtonPost.com
Wednesday, August 13, 2008; 7:42 PM
-- People with chronic chest pain who are not in big danger of a heart attack now may
have even less reason to rush into an artery-opening angioplasty: There's more evidence drugs should be tried first and often
are just as effective.
The slim early advantage for angioplasty at relieving pain in these non-emergency cases
starts to fade within six months and vanishes after three years, according to a new report from a landmark heart study.
That is sooner than the five years doctors estimated last year after their first analysis
of the study. The new information comes from patients' own reports of how they fared after treatment. Results are in Thursday's
New England Journal of Medicine.
“This study should be enlightening and practice-changing for doctors and patients
alike," and should lead more to try drugs before resorting to the $40,000 heart procedure, said Duke University's
Dr. Eric Peterson, who co-authored an editorial in the medical journal.
The number of angioplasties has been falling since the first results from this big
study came out in 2007, according to new figures requested by The Associated Press from an American
College of Cardiology database.
Angioplasty remains the top treatment for people having a heart attack or hospitalized
with worsening symptoms. It involves using a tiny balloon to flatten a clog and propping the artery open with a mesh tube
called a stent.
However, at least a third of angioplasties are done on people not in imminent danger,
to relieve chest pain. These patients are no more likely to die or suffer a heart attack if initially treated with drugs alone,
the big 2,287-patient study revealed.
Still, angioplasty's fans tout it as a quick fix that improves quality of life. That
benefit is fairly small and short-lived, compared to good medication use alone, the new report found.
Researchers did follow-up health surveys of about 70 percent of the study's participants.
At the start, 78 percent had chest pain.
Three months after treatment, 53 percent of patients who had angioplasties plus drug
treatment and 42 percent of the drugs-alone patients were free of chest pain. Both groups continued to improve, and the gap
started to narrow within six months. After three years, their scores on chest pain, quality-of-life and treatment satisfaction
did not significantly differ.
"Patients get better," regardless of which initial treatment they have, said study
leader Dr. William Weintraub of Christiana Care Health System in Newark, Del.
One exception: Those who started out with more severe chest pain fared better with
angioplasty. And not everyone did well on drugs alone _ about one-third ultimately needed an angioplasty or heart bypass surgery.
The study was funded by the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, the Medical
Research Council of Canada and a host of drug companies. Many of the researchers have consulted for drug makers, and many of the study's
critics have consulted for stent makers.*
People in the study were properly tested to ensure they were medically stable, said
Dr. Spencer King, a cardiologist at St. Joseph's Heart and Vascular Institute
in Atlanta and past president of the cardiology college.
"My greatest fear" is that some patients now may be given medications without adequate
testing to show angioplasty can safely be delayed, he said.
The study patients also received an ideal mix of medicines, potentially including aspirin,
cholesterol-lowering statins, nitrates, ACE inhibitors, beta-blockers and calcium channel blockers.
Not all patients do, especially when doctors are paid more to do an angioplasty than
for the many office visits needed to get the meds right.
"It's a tricky business and it requires a lot of close followup," said Dr. W. Douglas
Weaver, a heart specialist at Henry Ford Health System in Detroit and president
of the cardiology college.
About 1 million angioplasties are done in the United
States each year.
The number started to decline before the study came out, because of safety worries
about certain stents, and continued to fall after it, said Dr. Ralph Brindis, a California
heart specialist who heads the cardiology college's cardiovascular data registry.
The proportion of angioplasties done on people with chronic but stable chest pain dropped
from 18 percent in early 2005 to just over 15 percent by March 2008, the registry shows. Started 10 years ago, it now includes
information on about 530,000 angioplasties per year _ roughly 60 percent of the national total.
___
On the Net:
New England Journal: http://www.nejm.org
*
Again it is not what they tested but what they didn’t test. Among
them would be the use of aspirin alone, or aspirin with niacin. And of course
there was no monitoring of side effects or reporting how many stents failed because they have been occluded with plaque. The issue of side effects of course is not raised.
Cognitive decline similar to that of bypass
occurs with stents (below), and who knows what happens to those on the cocktail of drugs
Risks associated with vascular stents
Executive function has been demonstrated to decline in patients who undergo coronary
artery bypass as well as individuals who receive vascular stents. The mechanism of action for cognitive decline in bypass
surgery is believed to be due to the release of tiny emboli into the blood stream that subsequently travel into the brain
resulting in small strokes or ischemia. While the same degree of decline in executive function or 'IQ' occurs in vascular stenting of the coronary arteries, the mechanism
of action remains unknown. This decline from pre-procedure baseline has been observed soon after surgery and as far out as
six years post surgery. While the decline is minimal, it is measurable, consistent and appears to be permanent. Lifestyle
modifications to treat elevated cholesterol, diabetes and hypertension offer the safest course of action in treating non-life
threatening coronary artery disease.—at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stent
For a Scientific American article on pump head go to http://healthfully.org/heart/id3.html.
There is an issue with cognitive impairment with statins—however, that too has
not been studied--jk. Niacin and aspirin are the safest, healthful, and
cheap solution.
