HowToPreventHeartDisease.com

Is Medication As Good As Bypass Surgery or Angioplasty?
 

When one’s heart artery is blocked, the doctor will normally recommend him or her to undergo angioplasty or coronary artery bypass surgery, depending on how severe the blockage is.

Coronary artery bypass surgery, also known as coronary artery bypass graft surgery, heart bypass or bypass surgery, is a surgical procedure that will relieve angina and reduce the risk of death from coronary artery disease. Arteries or veins from elsewhere in the patient's body are grafted to the coronary arteries to bypass the blocked artery and improve the blood supply to the coronary circulation supplying the myocardium (heart muscle). Angioplasty, on the other hand, is a procedure that clears blocked arteries by inserting metal stents or balloons through the arteries.

A recent study, presented at an American Diabetes Association meeting in New Orleans on June 7, 2009, indicated that drugs are just as good as prompt bypass surgery or angioplasty to clear the blocked heart arteries for diabetics with stable heart disease.

There are about 24 million Americans suffer from diabetes, which is a disease closely linked to high blood glucose levels when one’s body has difficulty to produce or use insulin. Diabetes is also a known risk factor for heart disease.
 

The study, published on June 11, 2009 in the New England Journal of Medicine, also revealed that quick bypass surgery in patients with more severe heart disease did not actually decrease their mortality but would lower the risk of later major cardiac events. In other words, prompt coronary artery bypass surgery, as compared with intensive medical therapy alone, had significantly reduced non-fatal heart attacks.

The drug maker GlaxoSmithKline funded the study, which was conducted at 49 clinical sites in the United States and abroad. 2,368 patients with both Type-2 diabetes and stable heart disease were studied by the United States researchers from the University of Pittsburgh, Mayo Clinic College of Medicine and Case Western Reserve University. The patients were randomly selected to receive both drugs and prompt revascularization treatment or only drugs.

There was no significant difference found in survival, heart attack or stroke rates after 5 years. The results showed 88.3 percent survival rate for the group receiving either bypass surgery or angioplasty, as compared with 87.8 percent for the group with drug therapy.
Meanwhile, the researchers also could not find any significant difference in survival rate between patients who received insulin-providing drugs (87.9 percent) and those who received insulin-sensitizing drugs (88.2 percent). Nevertheless, they did note that patients with more severe heart disease and underwent bypass surgery seemed to respond particularly well on insulin-sensitizing drugs.

It was warned that the result obtained was preliminary as the researchers did not set out to answer this question with their study design. Nevertheless, the results did provide reassurance that the current major drug treatments for diabetes are equally appropriate as revascularization.

Type-2 diabetics with more severe heart disease should undergo bypass surgery early instead of waiting and being treated with medication, suggested by researchers, who also urged patients with milder heart disease to consider angioplasty and treatment with drug therapy first.

Copyright 2007-2012 © HowToPreventHeartDisease.com . All Rights Reserved.d.......
Created by EpublishingVault.com
Heart Disease Prevention - 8 Simple Ways You Can Do Immediately