Surgeons withdraw support for heart disease advice

[nitpicker]

https://www.bbc.com/news/health-50715156

Surgeons withdraw support for heart disease advice

By Deborah Cohen and Ed Brown
BBC Newsnight

9 December 2019

Europe's professional body for heart surgeons has withdrawn support for the guidelines, saying it was "a matter of serious concern" that some patients may have had the wrong advice.

Guidelines recommended both stents and heart surgery for low-risk patients. But trial data leaked to Newsnight raises doubts about this conclusion.
(snip)

In 2016, the results of the trial for patients three years after their treatments were published in the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine. The article concluded stents and heart surgery were equally effective for people with left main coronary artery disease.

But researchers had failed to publish data for the common, "Universal" definition of a heart attack.

Newsnight has seen that unpublished data and it shows that under the universal definition, patients in the trial that had received stents had 80% more heart attacks than those who had open heart surgery.
(snip)