Now they tell us.
Heart specialists who sifted through a registry of more than 600,000 people treated with catheters, inflatable balloons and stents to clear blocked coronary arteries found the procedures were used too often in patients with stable heart trouble.
About 12 percent of the interventions in stable patients, almost all of which involve putting in a stent, were judged to be inappropriate using criteria agreed to by a half-dozen cardiology groups in 2009. The appropriateness of more than a third was uncertain, leaving half of the interventions performed in stable patients in the appropriate column.
Where do doctors go wrong? The most common problem in these patients is using a stent when the patients had no angina, or only very mild symptoms. Previous research has shown that treatment with drugs rather than stents is a reasonable course of action for most of these sorts of patients.
Categories: Health