For heart patients with clogged arteries, the choice between bypass surgery and an angioplasty may come down to one question: How many procedures would you like to have?
In research presented Monday at the European Society of Cardiology meeting in Munich, Germany, experts concluded that while bypass surgery and angioplasty offer comparable results, patients who have angioplasties are twice as likely to require another procedure within a year.
“If you don’t want to have another heart operation for at least a decade, you should pick the surgery,” said Dr. Heinz Drexel, professor of medicine at the University of Innsbruck in Austria and spokesman for the European Society of Cardiology. Drexel was not connected to the research.
An angioplasty is a non-surgical procedure in which a balloon is pushed into a blood vessel to flatten the blockage, leaving a stent to prop the artery open.
In the study, European doctors compared open-heart surgery with angioplasty in a trial of more than 3,000 patients in Europe and the United States.
After one year, researchers also found that patients who had surgery had a lower death rate.
