SAN FRANCISCO, Oct 15, 2008 (UPI via COMTEX) -- U.S. researchers say they've
found patients receiving elective angioplasty and stenting aren't first stress
tested, as called for in medical guidelines.
Percutaneous coronary intervention, or PCI -- the clinical name for angioplasty
and cardiac stenting -- is used to open narrowed coronary arteries. Guidelines
published by the American College of Cardiology, the American Heart Association
and the Society for Cardiovascular Angiography and Intervention state that, for
most patients, vessels to be dilated by PCI must be shown by non-invasive stress
tests to be "associated with a moderate to severe degree of ischemia."
The researchers said prior studies showed patients undergoing PCI according to
the guidelines had better outcomes.
To determine if the guidelines were being followed, researchers from the
University of California-San Francisco, the Maine Medical Center and the
Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center analyzed data from a random sample of nearly
24,000 Medicare patients 65 years of age or older, who had elective PCI at U.S.
hospitals during 2004.
The researchers said they found 44.5 percent of the patients underwent stress
testing during the 90 days before the elective PCI procedure.
The study appears in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
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Copyright 2008 by United Press International