Drugs at par with stents in treating heart attacks
POSTED February 21, 2009 - 17:01 | POSTED BY Jaspreet Kaur
Last edited by Shikha Patial on February 21, 2009 - 21:59
Durham, February 21: A latest research by a team of scientists at the Duke University shows that drugs are as efficient as stents in treating heart attacks. In fact, drugs are less expensive than stents.
Wire mesh stents are used to open clogged arteries and can help to save lives if used within a few hours after the heart attack occurs. But if the heart attack happens prior to when the patient asks for treatment, then clot-busting drugs are as effective as stents.
Reducing use stents could result in an average saving of $7000 per patient. These savings would be advanced in favor of 100,000 U.S. heart patients as a part of President Barack Obama’s stimulus plan.
Healthcare development has no doubt improved life expectancy in the United States but this has come up at a high price. Healthcare expenditure in the United States has increased by around ten percent each year since 1970 and presently stands at $2 trillion a year.
Joel Miller, senior vice president for operations at the National Coalition on Health Care, remarked, “We need to put more resources into research to know what works and doesn’t work for same medical conditions.” He further said, “Physicians and patients need better data, and this is a case in point.”
Stenting has proved to be a crucial lifesaver in many heart attack cases but it falls short in instances where patients have overlooked chest pain and avoided medical care for weeks. Even then, doctors choose to implant a stent.
Dr. Daniel Mark, Lead Author of the study was quoted as saying, “The thinking was that the heart might still be happier if it had another big pipe of blood flow, even though that part of the heart was not coming back.”
The study shows that patients who got stent implants stayed 1.2 days more in the hospital than the ones who got drugs.
As far as the cost difference is concerned, it was $22,859 for stent patients in contrast to $12,683 for the drug group therapy.
The study has been published in the New England Journal of Medicine.
