New York Times
By Gina Kolata, Nov. 2, 2017
A procedure used to relieve chest pain in hundreds of thousands of heart patients each year is useless for many of them, researchers reported in the Lancet. Excerpts follow...
Heart disease is still the leading killer of Americans — 790,000 people have heart attacks each year — and stenting is a mainstay treatment in virtually every hospital. More than 500,000 heart patients worldwide have stents inserted each year to relieve chest pain, according to the researchers. Inserting them costs from $11,000 to $41,000 at hospitals in the United States.
“All cardiology guidelines should be revised,” Dr. David L. Brown of Washington University School of Medicine and Dr. Rita F. Redberg of the University of California, San Francisco, wrote in an editorial published with the new study.
Since stenting carries some risks, including death, perhaps stents should be used only for people who are having heart attacks.
In 2007, another large study without an untreated control group found stents did not prevent heart attacks or deaths from heart disease.
The NY Times article is much more user friendly than the article in The Lancet. Gina Kolata has done a great job in parsing the study for us.
Abstract of The Lancet study.
You can also Download Lancet Article Full Text
It is a sad commentary how a profitable and expensive procedure can gain such wide-spread acceptance. Everyone liked it. Doctos and hospitals made bundles. Device makers stocks went up. Patients felt better. Of course, maybe this study (of only 200 patients) may prove flawed. After all, Ioannidis has shown that 80% of the studies in the medical literature will be disproved. But, this study makes us think and question cardiac dogma.