Patients with heart disease who have stents put in their arteries in addition to balloon angioplasty are less likely to die of their heart disease and less likely to need emergency bypass surgery than are patients who receive balloon angioplasty alone, according to a new study.
Balloon angioplasty is done by passing a thin tube, or catheter, into an artery in the groin.
The catheter is then maneuvered into the clogged artery and a balloon is expanded. The balloon pushes the cholesterol plaque against the wall of the artery and the vessel is opened up. Popma is director of interventional cardiology at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston. In this study, the researchers examined the medical records of more than 360,000 Medicare patients aged 65 and older who received balloon angioplasty in 1994 and 1996. Of these cases, almost 75,000 received stents.