The Change Mariner

New Studies Question Value of Opening Arteries

New York Times:

Researchers are also finding that plaque, and heart attack risk, can change very quickly -- "within a month, according to a recent study" -- by something as simple as intense cholesterol lowering. "The results are now snowballing," said Dr. Peter Libby of Harvard Medical School. "The disease is more mutable than we had thought."

The changing picture of what works to prevent heart attacks, and why, emerged only after years of research that was initially met with disbelief.
Early attempts to show that opening a narrowed artery saves lives or prevents heart attacks were unsuccessful. The only exception was bypass surgery, which was found to extend the lives of some patients with severe illness but not to prevent heart attacks. It is unclear why those patients lived longer; some think the treatment prevented their heart rhythms from going awry, while others say that the detour created by a bypass might be giving blood an alternate route when a clot formed somewhere else in the artery.

Some early studies indicated what was really happening, but were widely dismissed. As long ago as 1986, Dr. Greg Brown of the University of Washington at Seattle published a paper showing that heart attacks occurred in areas of coronary arteries where there was too little plaque to be stented or bypassed.

Posted by Bob King at March 21, 2004 01:28 PM | TrackBack
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