Health Discoveries: May 2007

CPR Techniques Are Changing
Drugs Can Work as Well as Angioplasty

CPR Techniques Are Changing

By Katharine Greider

The rules for CPR are changing. To help someone in cardiac arrest—the loss of heart function—you can forget about mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. The person is more likely to survive with good brain function if only chest compressions are performed, according to a study by Tokyo's Surugadai Nihon University Hospital that was reported in the Lancet March 17. Records of more than 4,000 adults who had cardiac arrest showed that twice as many survived with compressions only. Benjamin S. Abella, M.D., associate director of the Center for Resuscitation Science at the University of Pennsylvania, says one-step CPR might encourage more bystanders to attempt resuscitation.

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Drugs Can Work as Well as Angioplasty

By Katharine Greider

Many of the 1 million Americans who each year have angioplasty with stents inserted to open blocked arteries—at a cost of about $40,000 per procedure—might do just as well on conventional drugs, according to a new study. In a multi-center clinical trial that tracked more than 2,000 people with stable coronary disease, angioplasty didn't cut the risk of death, heart attack or other major heart complications. After five years, over 70 percent of patients were free of angina pains, whether they'd had surgery or used drugs. A third of patients in the study's drugs-only group eventually needed angioplasty, but waiting didn't appear to carry any risks. "The take-home message is that in this select group of patients you can safely defer angioplasty and stent placement," says Edward McNulty, M.D., a cardiologist at the University of California, San Francisco. But he emphasizes that people with symptoms such as chest pain at rest, for example, should seek immediate attention, and may need angioplasty. The findings were published in the April 12 New England Journal of Medicine.

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