Effectiveness of Heart Bypass Surpasses Drug Stents: Study

In a long sought quest to rule the best among bypass surgery and angioplasty to treat the sickest heart patients, findings of a new study unveiled at the European Society of Cardiologydefine meeting in Munich Monday pronounced that the effectiveness of open-heart surgery out-do the drug stents.

"Surgery still comes out as the winner in a head-to-head trial," the study published in the New England Journal of Medicine announced.

While, an open heart surgery or a heart bypass (as it is commonly called) is an invasive procedure that reroutes blood vessels to detour around blockages, angioplasty, a relatively new, non-invasive technique of mechanically widening the blocked arteries involves a tightly folded balloon being pushed into the blocked blood vessels. Monitoring the balloons’ movement on the computer screen, once the balloon reaches the targeted location it is then inflated to a fixed size using water pressures some 75 to 500 times normal blood pressure, leaving a stent, a tiny wire-mesh tube which leaks drug to prevent tissue re-growth, to prop the arterydefine open

Putting forward the results, experts revealed that though both procedure, bypass and drug stent, offer comparable results, patients opting for angioplasties were twice more likely to require another procedure within a year.

"Both procedures proved equally safe but those patients receiving Boston Scientific's drug-coated Taxus stent were more likely to need a repeat procedure, tipping the results in favor of surgery," researchers said.

The compare the effectiveness of open-heart surgery versus angioplasty, European expects adjudge over 3,000 patients in 85 hospitals across Europe and the United States.

The study primarily focused on patients who had single or multiple vessel blockages, excluding the patients being diagnosed with acute heart attacks.

After one year, 17.8 percent patients receiving stents, either died, suffered a stroke, suffered a heart attack or needed a repeat procedure compared to 12.1 percent of those who had undergone bypass surgery.

Separately, while 3.5 percent patients receiving bypass surgery died at the end of one year; the mortality rate was 4.3 percent in angioplasty patients. While 14 percent of the patients whose arteries were propped open with a stent reported re-clogged arteries requiring a repeat procedure after a year, only 6 percent of the surgery patients required so, researchers found.

However conversely, surgery patients suffered a 2 percent stroke risk versus nearly zero risk for patients who had an angioplasty.

The study, called SYNTAX was sponsored by Boston Scientific's, the leading stent-maker.