Costly, Controversial Heart Failure Surgery Called ‘Ineffective’
Ventricular reconstruction, a controversial, risky, and expensive surgery designed to reshape the heart and help people better recover from heart failure, provides no real benefit in most patients, according to international medical researchers.
In the procedure, a surgeon folds scarred portions of a damaged heart in on itself in an effort to get the organ to beat better. Heart failure affects about five million people in the United States, but ventricular reconstruction surgery is rarely done as part of surgery to treat heart failure.
Medical researchers examined 1,000 volunteers who have undergone heart bypass surgery. About half of those also received ventricular reconstruction as part of their surgery. The researchers found that the procedure did not reduce deaths or the number of times heart-bypass patients had to return to the hospital for additional treatments.
The surgery also did not improve the patients’ quality of life measured after four years, the study found. People in the study were treated at 96 medical centers in 23 countries, researchers said.
No More Effective Than Other Treatments
Generally speaking, ventricular reconstruction was no more effective at reducing symptoms of heart failure than can be achieved with less risky measures such as good medical treatment, including drugs, said Dr. Robert Jones of Duke University Medical Center in North Carolina, one of the researchers.
Cutting out ventricular reconstruction from open heart surgeries will also save an average of nearly $15,000 in hospital costs per patient, the study found. Patients will also benefit by getting out of the surgery one hour earlier without the additional procedure.
Rarely Done Surgery
Ventricular reconstruction is rarely done in the United States, said Dr. Robert Michler of the Montefiore-Einstein Heart Center in New York City. In fact, less than 5,000 of the procedures have been done worldwide in the last decade, researcher said.
The procedure was once popular in South America and in Europe, and while some proponents of the surgery remain, many surgeons have determined that ventricular reconstruction is ineffective and not justified as an element of bypass surgery, according to the researchers.
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