Belated angioplasty saves no lives.A common heart procedure doesn't save lives if it is performed more than a couple of days after a heart attack heart attack n. , according to a large international clinical trial. Acute myocardial infarction typically resulting from an occlusion or obstruction of a coronary artery and characterized by sudden, severe pain in the chest that often radiates to the shoulder, arm, or jaw. The procedure, angioplasty balloon angioplasty inflation and deflation of a balloon catheter inside an artery, stretching the intima and leaving a ragged interior surface, triggering a healing response and breaking up of plaque. percutaneous transluminal angioplasty a type of balloon angioplasty in which the catheter is inserted through the skin and through the lumen of the vessel to the site of the narrowing., has been found to offer benefits when it's done within 48 hours of a heart attack (SN: 6/25/05, p. 413). In angioplasty, doctors force open a blocked heart artery by inserting and inflating a tiny balloon. Nearly one-third of heart attack patients don't realize what's happening to them and so get no treatment within the 2-day timeframe, says Judith S. Hochman of New York University, who led the new study. In that group, doctors typically still administer drugs and often perform angioplasty once the heart attack is diagnosed. "Until this trial was completed, we didn't know they were getting unnecessary [angioplasty] procedures," Hochman says. She and her colleagues studied 2,166 heart attack patients. All were given standard drug therapy, which usually includes administering aspirin and pills containing beta-blockers, during the period between 2 and 28 days, and on average 8 days, after the attack. The researchers then randomly selected half of the patients to receive angioplasty. After 3 years, rates of death, recurrence of heart attack, and development of severe heart failure were not significantly different between the two groups, Hochman reported.--B.H. |
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