Angioplasty Equals Bypass Surgery for Heart Patients: Study

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"We were kind of surprised by that result," Hlatky said. "No one had sat down and put all the data together. But even in this analysis, the number of such patients was fairly small. The issue will be decided by ongoing trials for patients with diabetes."

A decision about angioplasty versus bypass surgery is always easier to make outside the middle range of coronary artery disease looked at in these trials, both Bhatt and Hlatky said. "For high-risk coronary artery syndromes, revascularization [surgery] in general is the right thing to do," Bhatt said.

And angioplasty would be the procedure of choice for those whose condition could no longer be managed with drug therapy, Hlatky said. "We reviewed data from people in the intermediate zone of coronary disease," he said.

The analysis did not include angioplasties in which drug-coated stents, introduced several years ago, were used, rather than bare-metal stents. Use of the newer stents should not change the picture dramatically, Hlatky said.

More information

Coronary artery disease and its treatments are described by the U.S. National Institutes of Health.