Bypass Better Than Stent Use for Blocked Artery

Mar. 23 -- FRIDAY, March 23 (HealthDay News) -- Minimally invasive heart bypass surgery results in longer and better quality of life than the use of artery-opening stents for patients who have a single blocked coronary artery, according to the results of three British studies.

Two of the studies found that the minimally invasive bypass procedure was more cost-effective than stenting, and the third found that minimally invasive heart bypass surgery resulted in fewer complications than stenting.

"In this day and age, many patients, when they see a cardiologist, are told, or it is implied, that the same result can be achieved through a stent as it can with surgery, and that's not the case," said Dr. David Taggart, a professor of cardiovascular surgery at the University of Oxford and author of an accompanying editorial in the March 24 issue of the British Medical Journal.

Stents are tiny mesh tubes placed into arteries to increase blood flow. But, according to Taggart, many patients don't understand that within a few years after stenting, they have a sevenfold higher risk of needing new treatment compared with patients who had a bypass. "Even more important, they are at a higher risk of dying than if they had a bypass operation," he said.

In two of the studies, a team led by Dr. Thanos Athanasiou from the department of biosurgery and surgical technology, Imperial College London and St. Mary's Hospital,London, reviewed published studies that compared minimally invasive bypass surgery with stenting.

In one report, they found that a procedure called "minimally invasive left internal thoracic artery bypass" may be a more cost-effective medium- and long-term alternative to coronary artery stenting. In the other study, they concluded that this surgery "resulted in fewer complications in the mid-term" compared with stenting.

In the third study, Dr. Harry Hemingway, a professor of clinical epidemiology in the department of epidemiology and public health at University College London Medical School, and colleagues studied randomly selected patients who underwent either cardiac procedure.