Heart Roundup: Device-Maker Probes, Too Many Angiograms
The annual meeting of the American College of Cardiology gets underway this weekend and some heart-related items are in the news this morning:
Documents from leading medical-device makers suggest some companies seem to have encouraged the use of surgical ablation to treat atrial fibrillation, a front-page article in the WSJ reports. The problem, of course, is that the devices that can carefully destroy heart tissue linked to A-fib troubles aren’t FDA-approved for that purpose. A-fib is the most common type of faulty heartbeat.
The Justice Department is investigating and has won settlements with two lesser-known device makers. A former device saleswoman who brought those two cases has also sued Boston Scientific, Medtronic and St. Jude Medical. The DOJ hasn’t joined in those cases and the companies say none of their top execs were involved in any illegal marketing of the devices. More on the situation is here.
Coronary angiograms, widely used tests to detect artery blockages in the heart, often turn up little or no evidence of disease, a study in the New England Journal of Medicine found. That suggests that the more than a million U.S. patients who undergo the diagnostic test each year at a cost of about $10,000 each, are […]
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