Older people with diabetes and heart disease may want to consider bypass surgery over angioplasty. By pooling data from 10 previous studies, researchers found lower mortality rates with bypass than angioplasty for people with diabetes who were 65 to 75 years old. The two therapies treat clogged arteries differently. Bypass surgery creates an alternate route for blood to travel by grafting a blood vessel from elsewhere in the body to the arteries that feed into the heart. Angioplasty props open a narrowed artery. The authors could find no advantage for either method based on the severity of disease; only age and diabetes seemed to matter. However, they cautioned that their results may be skewed by studies that used less advanced angioplasty techniques. Future studies will address this concern.
Source: The Lancet, April 4, 2009