Drugs as effective as heart surgery?
From Times wire reports
Many heart attack victims treated only with drugs fare just as well as people who quickly receive some type of surgery to clear or bypass their blocked arteries, a new study has found.
William Boden, a heart specialist at Hartford Hospital in Connecticut who wrote an accompanying editorial in the Sept. 15 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine, said the results may not change the way heart attacks are treated in the United States because “we seem so enamored with the early interventional approach.”
But outside the U.S., where doctors have less access to equipment to probe for heart blockages, the new study will probably be reassuring, he said.
