According to a new study, though there are no immediate advantages of an ‘on pump’ bypass surgery over the traditional method, in the end, the ‘on pump’ method proved better.
Bypass surgery involves surgeons improving blood flow to the heart by sewing new blood vessels to get around blocked ones.
In the study, published Thursday in the New England Journal of Medicine, 2,203 patients were randomly assigned to have their bypass surgery on pump or off. Because the study was sponsored by the Department of Veterans Affairs, the patients were mostly men.
About 20 percent of the 225,000 to 250,000 people who have bypass surgery each year have it off pump and it is considered to be the most common surgical procedure in the world.
The research team observed that both the surgical treatments for heart bypass had virtually the same outcomes in terms of survival rates as well as medical complications within a month of the surgery.
One year after surgery, approximately 1 in 10 patients getting the off-pump procedure had died, suffered major complications, had heart attacks or required repeat bypasses, compared to 7.4 percent of those who underwent operations using heart-lung machines, researchers report in the Nov. 5 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine.
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