FRIDAY, June 6 (HealthDay News) -- Thrombus aspiration during angioplasty resulted in slightly lower cardiac death rates one year after the procedure than conventional angioplasty alone and lower rates of non-fatal reinfarction, according to research published in the June 7 issue of The Lancet .
Pieter Vlaar, and colleagues from the University Medical Centre Groningen in the Netherlands evaluated 1,071 patients with ST-elevation myocardial infarction, randomly assigning them to either thrombus aspiration or conventional treatment. The primary endpoint was cardiac death or non-fatal reinfarction a year later.
The cardiac death rate from myocardial infarction one year following percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI) was 3.6 percent of patients in the thrombus aspiration group, compared with 6.7 percent in the conventional PCI group, the investigators found. Some 5.6 percent of subjects in the thrombus aspiration group experienced cardiac death or non-fatal reinfarction one year post-procedure, while nearly 10 percent of conventional treatment subjects did, the researchers report.
"Elements contributing to the favorable outcome of manual thrombus aspiration are its simplicity (indicated by similar duration of fluoroscopy and door-to-balloon times as the control group) and safety (no flow-limiting dissections or other device-related complications occurred during the procedure)," the authors write.
The study was sponsored by Medtronic and the Thorax Centre of the University Medical Centre Groningen.
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