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March 27th, 2012 
FAKE NEWS for the Zionist agenda TUESDAY, March 27 (HealthDay News) — Patients over the age of 65
who have severe coronary artery disease fare better with bypass surgery
than with minimally invasive angioplasty, a large, new study
indicates.
Although there was no significant difference in mortality after one
year, patients who had undergone bypass surgery had a 21 percent reduced
risk of dying after four years compared to those who had received
angioplasty, the researchers found.
“Here, individuals over the age of 65 had a survival benefit with
surgery, so this may be a better choice for these individuals,” said Dr.
Nieca Goldberg, medical director of the Joan H. Tisch Center for Women’s
Health at NYU Langone Medical Center in New York City.
Goldberg was not involved with the study, which is to be presented
Tuesday at the American College of Cardiology annual meeting in Chicago
and simultaneously published in the New England Journal of
Medicine.
The trend in cardiology more recently has been to favor angioplasty
over surgery, explained study author Dr. William Weintraub.
During angioplasty, cardiologists insert a small “balloon” into the
blocked vessel via a catheter. Once in place, the balloon is inflated to
widen the vessel. The procedure can be done with or without placing a
stent, a wire mesh scaffold that keeps the vessel propped open.
Coronary artery bypass surgery involves grafting part of a healthy
vessel onto the blocked vessel to reroute blood flow, “bypassing” the
blocked part of the vessel.
But Weintraub, who is chair of cardiology at Christiana Care Health
System in Newark, Del., said he did not envision an immediate sea change
in clinical practice as the result of these findings.
“People will give surgery another thought, especially for sicker
patients,” he said. “Rather than being a huge, huge change, this may
switch it back a little.”
Weintraub and his colleagues combined information from two large
databases which, all told, included about 200,000 patients, all elderly
and all with more than one blood vessel blocked.
About 86,000 underwent surgery and 104,000 had angioplasty. Of those
who had angioplasty, 78 percent received drug-eluting stents, 16 percent
received bare-metal stents and 6 percent had no stents.
Drug-eluting stents, considered state-of-the-art, ooze a drug out into
the artery that prevents scar tissue from building up.
Patients undergoing surgery tended to have more complications such as
diabetes, lung disease and heart failure, although the authors did adjust
for these factors.
Although the study was not a randomized, controlled trial — considered
the gold standard of medicine because those studies randomly assign people
to different treatments and compares them with those who are untreated —
it had several advantages, including the fact that it was looking at a
“real-world” population in real time, said Dr. Gregory Fontana, chairman
of cardiothoracic surgery at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York City.
This older population is very broad and represents probably the largest
proportion of individuals who need this type of treatment, Fontana said,
although the results probably can be extrapolated to other groups.
More information
The U.S. National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute has more on bypass surgery.
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