Stents Provide a Lesson on Healthcare

Intuitively, stents make sense. If you’ve got occasional chest pain due to reduced blood flow to your heart, having a stent—a thin mesh tube inserted into a coronary artery to hold it open—is a seemingly logical solution. Half a million of these procedures, called angioplasties, are performed every year, at a cost of roughly $20,000 apiece. Alas, sometimes hard data trumps intuition. Recently, a landmark “sham surgery” study showed these procedures don’t make a difference in people with stable angina and a single narrow coronary artery. Stents are inserted using a catheter. In this study, 200 people with chest pain who had single vessel disease had the catheter inserted. Half of them got a stent, and half did not (that’s the sham arm of the study). And the envelope please… Six weeks after the procedure, there was no real difference in the patients, either in chest pain or performance on treadmill tests. In other words, the placebo surgery did just as well as the real thing. While these results were described as “unbelievable” by some cardiologists, they are not much of a stretch from what we already knew about stenting. Even five years ago, the New York Times reported on research that found No Extra Benefits Are Seen in Stents for Coronary Artery Disease in patients with stable angina. That article also reported there was an “insignificant difference” between people who have had stents inserted and those who didn’t. A cardiologist and professor of medicine at Yale told the New York Times, “When people are making decisions, it’s important to disclose to them that this procedure [stenting]—outside of an emergency—is not known to be life-saving or to prevent heart attacks,” adding, “the vast majority of people who have this procedure have the expectation that it will help them live longer. That belief is out of alignment with the evidence.” See also: Global Trend Map No. 4: Industry Health   The good news is that we know that there are more conservative measures that can slow or reverse heart disease, include quitting smoking, exercising more, improving your diet and losing weight if possible. There are a range of safe and effective drugs that can help reduce chest pain as well as your risk of a heart attack. Although rare, there are some serious risks with angioplasty, such as bleeding from the site of the incision used to insert the catheter, damage to the blood vessel itself, irregular heartbeats and damage to the kidneys caused by the dye used. The risks of complications are low, but why would you take any risk, endure an uncomfortable recovery and pay a substantial co-pay or deductible, if there is no evidence of benefit? Like many medical procedures, the amount of unneeded and unnecessary stenting is a byproduct of the healthcare system’s financial structure that rewards doing more procedures, when doing less is often wiser and certainly cheaper. Sometimes the best procedure is none at all.