What is better: Coronary artery bypass surgery OR Angioplasty with stent? Another article (SYNTAX Study), another viewpoint!!

For heart patients with clogged arteries, the choice between bypass surgery or an angioplasty may come down to one question: How many procedures would you like to have?
In research presented Monday at the European Society of Cardiology meeting in Munich, experts concluded that while bypass surgery and angioplasty offer comparable results, patients who have angioplasties are twice as likely to require another procedure within a year.

Also note:

After one year, researchers found that the death rate among the two groups was virtually the same: 7.7 percent among surgery patients and 7.6 percent among angioplasty patients.

In patients who had an angioplasty, nearly 14 percent needed another procedure after a year, compared with about 6 percent of surgery patients.

But patients who had surgery had about a 2 percent stroke risk versus nearly zero risk for patients who had an angioplasty. Doctors said that any surgery had an inherent stroke risk, compared with an angioplasty.

The study was also underpowered to provide definite results.

Reference: European Society of Cardiology, Associated Press

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Tags: Angioplasty, Atherosclerosis, Bypass, CABG, catheterization, PCI, Stent, Surgery, SYNTAX Study

This entry was posted on Monday, September 1st, 2008 at 4:30 pm and is filed under Health News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.