Unnecessary Heart Surgery Can Be Dangerous

Aug. 8, 2012— -- When The New York Times reported Tuesday that doctors at HCA Health Care hospitals in Florida might have performed cardiac procedures on patients who didn't need them, it raised questions about the risks of such unnecessary surgery.

ABCNews.com's Medical Unit breaks down the risks of such procedures for you, step by step:

Cardiac Catheterization

Since cardiac catheterization is a diagnostic test, doctors tend to disagree about when it is necessary to subject patients to it. As such, this area is a bit more "gray" than unnecessary stents, doctors told ABCNews.com.

"If you have a massive heart attack, almost everyone would agree you should undergo cardiac catheterization," Dr. Deepak Bhatt, who directs the Integrated Interventional Cardiovascular Program at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, told ABCNews.com. "That's one end of the spectrum where really there's little room for debate."

On the other end, there are symptom-free patients who perhaps have abnormal stress-test results. Or maybe they're having chest pains in the emergency room but are only experiencing indigestion. Either way, they're told they need the test.

"How does a patient, when they're having a heart attack, say, 'I don't think so?'" Dr. Mark Adelman, the chief of Vascular Surgery at NYU Langone Medical Center, asked ABCNews.com.

When a patient undergoes cardiac catheterization, a wire tube, or sheath, is inserted into the arteries in the patient's groin or wrist area (femoral or radial arteries). The sheath carries equipment up to the heart, but before it can get there, the patient faces an initial set of risks:

"Any of those can be life-threatening problems," Adelman told ABCNews.com. "Those are the local complications."

Next, the doctors thread the sheath up the artery toward the heart, resulting in the second set of risks:

Stents

Once doctors have threaded their equipment inside the body, they can choose whether to insert a stent, which is a metal mesh tube that works with a balloon to expand and open up a narrow artery. If a stent is inserted, the patient faces another set of immediate risks:

Regardless of whether a stent is necessary, Bhatt said one or two out of every 100 patients undergoing stent surgery experiences major complications, such as heart attack or stroke, even death. He said the risk is higher in people who have heart disease, but even for patients who don't need stents, the risk isn't "zero."