Surgery may help with heart failure

Quite often, people with heart failure have some degree of blockage of the coronary arteries. In such cases, those who undergo surgery to clear to arteries have markedly better survival than those treated with medication, researchers from Canada...

Quite often, people with heart failure have some degree of blockage of the coronary arteries. In such cases, those who undergo surgery to clear to arteries have markedly better survival than those treated with medication, researchers from Canada report.

"Our main finding," Dr. Ross Tsuyuki said, "was that those receiving revascularization procedures - bypass surgery or percutaneous coronary intervention (angioplasty, for example) - had half the risk of dying compared to those who did not."

Tsuyuki, at the University of Alberta Hospital in Edmonton, and colleagues used data from the Alberta Provincial Project for Outcomes Assessment in Coronary Heart Disease (APPROACH) study to review the survival rates of 1690 patients with heart failure who had coronary artery disease treated medically and 2,538 who underwent coronary revascularisation surgery.

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