More Bad News for Cardiac Devices

The results of a pair of studies released last month drew attention to problems associated with cardiac medical devices.
A recent study detailed in Archives of Internal Medicine showed that infections commonly result from the use of cardiovascular implantable electronic devices, increasing costs and patient mortality. The study found that the infection rate among patients who received cardiovascular implantable electronic devices (including pacemakers, ICDs, CRT-Ds, and CRT-Ps) is nearly 3%.
M. Rizwan Sohail, MD, an assistant professor of medicine at the Mayo Clinic College of Medicine (Rochester, MN), hopes the study will bring renewed attention to the problem.

“[There is an] enormous cost of complications and mortality associated with complex medical procedures,” he explained in a press release. “Prevention of these infectious complications can lead to major cost savings and improve survival in this group of patients.”

That study comes on the heels of government-funded research that found a drug regimen outperforms stents in preventing recurrent strokes. The results, printed last month in the New England Journal of Medicine, showed that patients who received percutaneous transluminal angioplasty and stenting were more than two-and-a-half times as likely to die or suffer another stroke than those who underwent medical therapy for atherosclerotic intracranial arterial stenosis.

—MD+DI staff