(Ivanhoe Newswire) -- It may be a more invasive surgery, but new research
shows heart bypass surgery leads to longer lives than angioplasty for specific
groups of patients.
A new study involving nearly 8,000 patients from 10 clinical trials around the
world shows heart patients who have diabetes and are older than 65 have lower
mortality rates after five years if they had bypass surgery compared to those
who had angioplasty.
The death rate for diabetics after a five-year follow-up was 12 percent for
those who had coronary artery bypass surgery compared with 20 percent for the
angioplasty procedure. For those patients over 65, the mortality rate was 11
percent for those who had bypass compared with 15 percent for those who had
angioplasty.
This is one of the first major studies to determine if one active treatment is
better than another, rather than just gauging whether a treatment works better
than a placebo, the study's authors said.
David Taggart, M.D., Ph.D., professor of cardiovascular surgery at the
University of Oxford, called the study "the most definitive and authoritative
analyses" of randomized trials comparing bypass surgery to angioplasty in an
accompanying editorial.
"It took some time to get individual patient data from all the participating
trials, but it was worth it because the pooled analysis is much more valuable if
it's based on essentially all the data. In the end we were able to analyze data
from 95 percent of all the patients worldwide with multi-vessel coronary disease
enrolled in a clinical trial of bypass surgery and angioplasty," Taggart was
quoted as saying.
The study's authors said they hope future studies will determine why bypass
surgery is more effective for treating diabetic and older patients.
SOURCE: Published on The Lancet's Web site on March 19, 2009
