Medical Guesswork | Bypass That Operation?

Medical Guesswork | Bypass That Operation?

BusinessWeek, May 29, 2006

Each year doctors perform 400,000 bypass surgeries and 1 million angioplasties, where mesh tubes are placed in diseased arteries to hold them open. While most people believe that such surgery is life-saving, the available data say otherwise. Except for about 3% of people with severe heart disease, treatment with drugs alone works just as well to extend life and prevent heart attacks as surgery does.

"Cardiologists like to open up arteries," says Dr. David D. Waters, chief of cardiology at San Francisco General Hospital. "But there is no evidence that opening up chronically narrowed arteries reduces the risk of heart attack." Harvard Medical School's Dr. Roger J. Laham figures that at least 400,000 angioplasties a year are unnecessary. "I'm sure we are way overtreating our patients," he says. Surgery carries big risks, such as mental declines after bypass operations. The overuse is exacting a big toll on individual patients and the health-care system, argue such experts as Dr. Nortin M. Hadler, professor of medicine at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

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