Results of study on stenting chest pain patients misinterpreted: researchers
TORONTO — It’s hard to believe that a single small study could cause such a hullabaloo, but that’s been the case with a research paper that looked at the effectiveness of using stents to open up clogged coronary arteries in patients with chest pain known as angina.
The U.K.-led study published last week in The Lancet has sparked a heated international debate among doctors about how best to treat such patients — by inserting a mesh tube into their blocked artery to improve blood flow or by prescribing anti-angina pills?
“I think there was a lot of hysteria here,” said study co-author Dr. Justin Davies, a professor of cardiology at Imperial College London, pointing to the headline on a New York Times story about the study: “‘Unbelievable’: Heart stents fail to ease chest pain.”
Dr. Rasha Al-Lamee, an Imperial College interventional cardiologist who led the study, was somewhat more circumspect in her reaction to how the findings were interpreted by some heart disease experts quoted by various media outlets.