Surgery may help people with heart failure
(Reuters)
Updated: 2006-08-31 10:20 NEW YORK - Quite often,
people with heart failure have some degree of blockage of the coronary arteries.
In such cases, those who undergo surgery to clear to arteries have markedly
better survival than those treated with medication, researchers from Canada
report.
"Our main finding," Dr. Ross Tsuyuki told Reuters Health, "was that those
receiving revascularization procedures -- bypass surgery or percutaneous
coronary intervention (angioplasty, for example) -- had half the risk of dying
compared to those who did not."
Tsuyuki, at the University of Alberta Hospital in Edmonton, and colleagues
used data from the Alberta Provincial Project for Outcomes Assessment in
Coronary Heart Disease (APPROACH) study to review the survival rates of 1690
patients with heart failure who had coronary artery disease treated medically
and 2538 who underwent coronary revascularization surgery.
According to the team's report in the Canadian Medical Association Journal,
the crude 1-year death rate was 11.8 percent among patients who underwent
revascularization compared with 21.6 percent among those who did not.
"We did a number of statistical adjustments to account for differences in
patient characteristics and factors which might influence the decision to
revascularize, but came up with the same conclusion," Tsuyuki explained.
"All patients with heart failure should be assessed for coronary artery
disease blockages and, if feasible, be considered for revascularization," he
concluded.
SOURCE: Canadian Medical Association Journal, August 15,
2006.
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