Angioplasty May Be Safer for Low-Risk Heart Disease Patients

Follow-up angiographs were available for 136 (62%) of the patients. At one year, the cumulative event-free survival rate for cardiac death was 97.7%, and the event-free rate for restenosis was 92.9%. Over the course of the study, 22 patients needed to be retreated due to restenosis, mostly during the first year of the study; of those patients, 14 underwent a repeat angioplasty and 8 had bypass surgery. At almost four years, 20 patients had died, of which 9 deaths were cardiac-related. The study was published in the June 2011 issue of the Journal Catheterization and Cardiovascular Interventions.

“Our analysis found that the short-term outcomes were excellent; patients who survived after the first year had very good long-term survival and a low incidence of retreatment,” said lead author Michael Lee, MD, an assistant professor of cardiology at the UCLA medical center.

The current standard of care for patients with ULMCA disease is coronary artery bypass graft (CABG) surgery, a surgical procedure performed to relieve angina and reduce the risk of death from coronary artery disease (CAD). Arteries or veins from elsewhere in the patient's body are grafted to the coronary arteries to bypass atherosclerotic narrowings and improve the blood supply to the coronary circulation supplying the myocardium. PCI is recommended in clinical conditions that predict an increased risk of adverse surgical outcomes.

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