CUTTING CHOLESTEROL CAN PROLONG BYPASS'S EFFECTS, STUDY SAYS.Byline: Associated Press Associated Press: see news agency. Associated Press (AP) Cooperative news agency, the oldest and largest in the U.S. and long the largest in the world. Aggressively lowering cholesterol can help keep people's bypass operations from going bad years after their surgery, a study found. About 400,000 Americans have bypasses each year to reroute blood around clogged heart arteries. Over time, though, these detours can fill up with fat and cholesterol, too. When this happens, people may need repeat surgery. Now, a large, federally sponsored study finds that cholesterol-lowering drugs can slow this process. ``This means physicians should now be aggressively lowering cholesterol to keep bypass grafts open. This is the first evidence we have had of that,'' said Dr. Michael Domanski of the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute in Bethesda, Md. Several studies have shown that drugs called statins Statins A class of drugs commonly used to lower LDL cholesterol levels. Mentioned in: C-Reactive Protein can slow clogging of the arteries that feed the heart. The latest work shows the same is true for the grafted vessels. The study was done on 1,351 men and women who had undergone bypass operations from one to 11 years earlier. In all of them, doctors had used pieces of vein to make their bypass grafts. Surgeons prefer to use bits of artery salvaged from the chest for this job, since they are much less prone to clogging. However, the artery is too short to make several repairs, which most bypass patients require. So typically surgeons resort to a mixture of artery and vein grafts. At the start of the study, the patients had levels of low-density lipoprotein cholesterol low-density lipoprotein cholesterol (lōˈ-denˑ·s that ranged from 130 to 175. LDL LDL - ["LDL: A Logic-Based Data-Language", S. Tsur et al, Proc VLDB 1986, Kyoto Japan, Aug 1986, pp.33-41]. is the form of cholesterol that clogs the arteries. The patients were randomly assigned to take either high doses or low doses of the cholesterol-lowering drug Mevacor, known generically as lovastatin lovastatin /lo·va·stat·in/ (lo´vah-stat?in) an antihyperlipidemic agent that acts by inhibiting cholesterol synthesis, used in the treatment of hypercholesterolemia and other forms of dyslipidemia and to lower the risks associated with . The goal was to get their LDL cholesterol LDL cholesterol n. See low-density lipoprotein. LDL Cholesterol Low-density lipoprotein cholesterol is the primary cholesterol molecule. High levels of LDL increase the risk of coronary heart disease. below 100. The results after four years of treatment were published in today's issue of the New England Journal of Medicine The New England Journal of Medicine (New Engl J Med or NEJM) is an English-language peer-reviewed medical journal published by the Massachusetts Medical Society. It is one of the most popular and widely-read peer-reviewed general medical journals in the world. . LDL levels in the high-dose group averaged 93, while in those getting low doses it averaged 136. The high doses significantly slowed clogging of the patients' vein grafts. |
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