A larger number of patients with coronary artery disease may benefit from bypass surgery than previously thought.
A new, long term study funded by the National Institutes of Health shows that patients with reduced heart function and clogged arteries have a better chance of surviving 10 years if they get a combination of bypass surgery and medication.
Dr. Leeway Chen director of UR Medicine's Heart Failure and Transplantation program, says a previous 5-year study had raised questions about whether surgery was beneficial for this subset of patients.
"But they, pretty amazingly, followed them for another five years and now they have ten year data,” Dr. Chen said. “Now they say, at ten years there seems to be a reduction in death and bad outcomes from the group that got the bypass surgery, as long as they also got medications."
Nearly 6 million Americans suffer from heart failure, and many of them also have the kind of artery disease as the subjects of this study.
The study involved 1,200 heart-failure patients from 22 countries, including the United States. Half were assigned to a group that received medication alone, and the other half also had bypass surgery.
The results showed that 59 percent of the bypass patients died from any cause, compared to 66 percent of those who received medication only.
Deaths from heart disease occurred in 41 percent of the patients in the bypass group and 49 percent of those enrolled in the medicine-only group.
