And Now, Some Ripped-From-the-Headlines Context…..
First, why a beating heart? Traditionally, if you had a clogged artery on your heart and doctors wanted to sew in some "bypass" arteries to get around the sluggish ones, the surgeon would shut your heart down, using a heart and lung machine to pump your blood instead. Less than a decade ago, though, doctors started collecting evidence suggesting that being on the pump could, occasionally, lead to strokes, memory loss and personality issues. Off-pump, beating-heart, bypass surgery became an alternative.
I'd had this video planned for the last couple of weeks. But, on Thursday, a big study came out that suggests off-pump isn't as great as everyone was hoping it would be–nor was on-pump as bad as everyone was worried about. The New York Times explains it thusly:
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. A year later, those who had had off-pump surgery had poorer outcomes. Fewer bypasses stayed open and patients were more likely to have needed a repeat operation or to have had a heart attack or to have died. They were no less likely to have had strokes or difficulty thinking.
Older 'Pump' Heart Bypass is Best, A Study Finds, from the New York Times
