Heart stents fail to ease chest pain

Study casts doubt on use of devices on most patients.

A procedure used to relieve chest pain in hundreds of thousands of heart patients each year is useless formany of them, researchers reported Wednesday.

Their study focused onthe insertion of stents, tiny wire cages, to open blocked arteries. The devices are life saving when used to open arteries in patients in the throes of a heart attack.

But they are most often used in patients who have a blocked artery and chest pain that occurs, for example, walking up a hill or going up stairs.

The new study, published in the Lancet, stunned leading cardiologists by countering decades of clinical experience. The findings raise questions about whether stents should be used so often — or at all — to treat chest pain.

Dr. William E. Boden, a cardiologist and professor of medicine at Boston University School of Medicine, called the results “unbelievable.”

Dr. David Maron, a cardiologist at Stanford University, praised the new study as “verywell conducted” but said that it left some questions unanswered. The participants had a profound blockage but only in one artery, he noted, and theywere assessed after just six weeks.

For the study, Dr. Justin E. Davies, a cardiologist at Imperial College London, recruited 200 patients with a profoundly blocked coronary artery and chest pain severe enough to limit physical activity, common reasons for inserting a stent.

All were treated for six weeks with drugs to reduce the risk of a heart attack, like aspirin, a statin and a blood pressure drug, as well as medications that relieve chest pain by slowing the heart or opening blood vessels.