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Microcap & Penny Stocks : AMERICAN BIOMED, Minimally Invasive Technology (ABMI) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: R.C.L. who wrote (401)	4/1/1998 12:48:00 AM
From: R.C.L.	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 2887

Interesting report alloon Still Best For Angioplasty NEW YORK (Reuters) -- Despite a variety of new catheter-based devices intended to scoop, scrape or laser fatty plaques out of the clogged arteries of heart disease patients, such techniques are no better than balloon angioplasty -- a procedure invented more than 20 years ago. That finding was reported in the current issue of the Journal of the American College of Cardiology. In balloon angioplasty, a balloon-tipped catheter is threaded into coronary arteries and inflated, pressing fatty plaque against the artery walls. However, vessels often re-close -- a process known as restenosis -- in the months afterwards and researchers are looking for new and better techniques to keep arteries open long-term. The one device that appears to be useful are stents, which are used to prop arteries open after an angioplasty. "The message from the study is to watch out for unbridled enthusiasm," said lead author Dr. Spencer King in a statement released by the American College of Cardiology (ACC). "In the first five years of this decade, there was enormous enthusiasm for all these new devices. What we've learned is that we need to be cautious about our enthusiasm," said King, of Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. King and colleagues looked at two registries funded by the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, one including balloon angioplasty patients -- Percutaneous Transluminal Coronary Angioplasty (PCTA), and the other a variety of different techniques -- New Approaches to Coronary Angioplasty (NACI). For those undergoing balloon angioplasty, the in-hospital mortality rate was 1% and the one-year mortality rate was 3.1%. In contrast, patients in NACI had a 1.8% in-hospital mortality rate and a 5.9% mortality rate one year after the procedure. After adjusting for the patients' risk factors, there was no difference in mortality rate for the two groups at the one year mark. As for restenosis, 21.5% of patients in the balloon angioplasty group had a repeat procedure, compared with 24.2% in the NACI registry. "Although technologic improvements (especially improved stenting) continue, these observations highlight the importance of careful assessment of clinical results in the broad population of patients in whom interventions are used," the authors concluded. SOURCE: Journal of the American College of Cardiology (1998;31:558-566)