Many Britons Aren’t Getting Needed Heart Surgery, Study Finds

More than one in four people in Britain who need surgery to reopen or bypass clogged heart arteries do not get it, according to a report in today’s New England Journal of Medicine by Dr. Harry Hemingway and his colleagues at the Kensington & Chelsea and Westminster Health Authority. The results may apply equally in the United States, Hemingway said.

Using a nine-member panel of experts to judge which patients could benefit most from bypass surgery or angioplasty (in which a balloon is used to expand a narrowed artery), the researchers found 26% of the 1,353 people who should have received bypass surgery received drug treatment instead. The patients who received the less-aggressive treatment were four times more likely than the surgery patients to die or have heart attacks, and three times more likely to continue having chest pain years later.

--Compiled by Times medical writer Thomas H. Maugh II