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Stent placement vs medication therapy: which will you chose?
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Here's a subject that I'll be pursuing: the use of angioplasty with stent placement and coronary bypass surgery to treat heart disease. The data is accumulating, and it indicates that for the most part, neither of these procedures extends life; rather, they can do further harm and lead to death.
For openers, consider the findings in this study:
"Routine PCI was associated with a marginal advantage in cardiac physical functioning compared with medical therapy alone at four months, but not thereafter, in the quality-of-life substudy of the Occluded Artery Trial (OAT) in high-risk stable patients with an occluded infarct-related artery three to 28 days' post-MI [1]. In addition, costs were higher and quality-adjusted survival was marginally lower in the PCI group."
Those words headed the "OAT quality-of-life and cost data published" article on heartwire this week.
If you eliminate all the cardiology jargon, the study reports that PCI -- angiogram with stent placement -- is only marginally better than the use of medication alone, and that's only for the first four months. After four months, there was no advantage to having PCI over medication therapy. In fact, medication therapy resulted in better quality of life and lower cost for treatment.
Data that suggest PCI is less than optimal to treat most coronary blockages has been available for some time. I will be delving into more eye-opening data regarding what have become routine cardiac procedures that bring in big bucks for doctors at the cost of American lives.
A treatment used to reverse heart disease permanently includes eating a low-fat vegan diet, exercise, smoking cessation, and stress management.
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