No Angioplasty for Blocked Arteries Anymore?
Celebrity blocked arteries have been in the news in the past few months a bit more than most people can remember reading about in a while. Bill Clinton had a procedure done with stents placed to help with this blocked arteries; David Letterman had a five-way bypass because all his arteries were practically all blocked. A lot of people who visit their doctors for a problem with blocked arteries, frequently have their doctors tell them that the best alternative. They have to prevent a heart attack is an angioplasty. This is a procedure where they send a device into an artery that’s closing down; the device expands like a balloon, squashes all the plaque that’s deposited itself on the walls of the artery and opens everything up. Once an artery is opened up, they put in a little tube called a stent to keep the artery from collapsing again. It’s always been thought to be a great and simple method to figure out a serious problem.
However, now, doctors are starting to feel differently – an angioplasty to open up blocked arteries may not really be the best way to keep a heart attack at,they feel.
What is more, unless you are actually having a heart attack, they feel that it will not really be a good method to keep you alive in the long run. If you have blocked arteries, but you seem to feel fine, ordinary stat in drugs that lower your cholesterol may be a much better bet. And it is not just some old out-of-the-way research that says this either – it’s the New England Journal of Medicine. Now this happens to be specially relevant research. There is one million angioplasties done around the country each year. And as far as the American Heart Association is concerned, that’s twice as many as need to be done. So why precisely do they feel that a balloon angioplasty doesn’t do plenty good?
The matter is, in people who aren’t going into cardiac arrest right then, a balloon angioplasty doesn’t really take care of the problem that needs taking care of – which are tiny little blockages and not the large ones that angioplasties are designed to take care of tiny little blockages frequently loosen up and travel along an artery and go to block something important. Doctors usually ignore the smaller blockages and go for the big ones because the big ones are the ones that look scary. When the little ones break a block something important, you could even get a heart attack. What you want to be exercise and cholesterol-lowering drugs. These are what can take care of the small plaques.
If your doctor insists on sticking to the old regimen of recommending angioplasty for blocked arteries, you had better probably gotten a second opinion.
