New Studies Question Value of Opening Arteries

March 22, 2004 | Source: New York Times

Most bypass surgery and angiogplasty are worthless, or even worse, because they are based on the wrong model of heart disease: fixing narrowings of specific blood vessels.

Heart patients may have hundreds of vulnerable plaques, so preventing heart attacks means going after all their arteries, not one narrowed section, by attacking the disease itself. That is what happens when patients take drugs to aggressively lower their cholesterol levels, get their blood pressure under control, and prevent blood clots.