Are stents and angioplasty worthwhile? The data questions it. Here's a snippet from an article, link below.
Death rates would no doubt plummet, too (from stents and angioplasty). Years ago, another five year study of heart patients was conducted by scientists at UCLA. All 64 patients had been scheduled for bypass surgery but opted to change their lifestyles and follow the eating and exercise guidelines of the Pritikin Program instead. Five years later, 80% still had not required bypass surgery.(2) What’s more, only two had died of heart attacks – a mere 3% of the patients involved – far less than the 14% and 16% death rates of the bypass and angioplasty patients in the newCirculation study.
The stents, or angioplasty does not change the underlying cause of the disease.
Here's another piece of the article.
“So you put a stent in that coronary artery, but unless you treat this as a systemic disease, unless you change the metabolic milieu that caused this disease to develop, you will not change the outcome,” states Steven E. Nissen, M.D., FACC, vice-chairman of cardiology at the Cleveland Clinic Foundation, a leading academic medical center, in his continuing education courses to physicians.
“Every single study I am aware of involving stenting, angioplasty, or any intervention does not change the prognosis. The risk of death from a myocardial infarction [heart attack] is exactly the same after the intervention as it was before the intervention.”
So why are bypass and angioplasty so popular? It’s a complicated issue. To begin with, they’re profit-makers; they help keep many hospitals in the black. In the U.S. alone, more than a million angioplasties (at $25,000+ each) and about 300,000 coronary bypasses (at $45,000+ each) are performed each year.
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article : http://www.pritikin.com/eperspective/0406/bestHeart_new.shtml
