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A new study shows that the use of beta radiation may prevent repeat blockages in heart vessels following angioplasty. The university of Maryland Medical Center was part of a multi-center study to evaluate the safety and effectiveness of using beta radiation to treat and prevent new blockages inside of stents. The study found that beta radiation reduced the frequency of repeat blockages by as much as 66 percent in the patients.
This is encouraging news for patients with coronoary artery disease who are at risk of repeat blockage within a stent after an angioplasty to open the vessel. A stent is a small tube that is inserted into the vessel to help keep it open after balloon angioplasty is performed.
In the study, patients were treated with ‘‘radiation seeds’’ (small pallets that emit radiation) immediately after angioplasty to open their blocked stents. The seeds were delivered through a catheter temporarily placed inside the patient’s artery then withdrawn after a few minutes. The patients were randomised to receive either a placebo or active radiation seeds. Patients returned the followup examinations eight months after the therapy. Eighty-six percent of percent of patients treated with radiation seeds had no recurrent blockage after eight months.
‘‘Beta radiation is a highly localised form of radiation. The treatment, which is called brachytherapy, takes very little time with minimal radiation exposure to healthy tissues in the patients’’.
The study, called the START trial, enrolled 476 patients at 50 medical centers in North America and Europe.
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