© 2002 Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health
SHORT REPORT
Mortality and morbidity surrounding coronary artery bypass surgery and the public presentation of risk
1 Department of Social Medicine, University of Bristol, Canynge Hall, Whiteladies Road, Bristol BS8 2PR, UK
2 Bristol Heart Institute, University of Bristol
Correspondence to:
Correspondence to:
Professor S Frankel;
stephen.frankel@bris.ac.uk
Accepted 7 November 2001
Keywords: coronary artery bypass
Deaths of patients on the waiting list for coronary artery bypass surgery are often presented by the media to the public and politicians as evidence of the remediable failure of health care.1 The assumption that many lives would be saved by more timely intervention is over-simplistic and takes no account of three important observations. Firstly, for approximately one third of low risk patients the principal reason for performing coronary artery bypass procedures is for the relief of angina, rather than mortality prevention.2 Secondly, people on waiting lists inevitably have widespread vascular disease and the atherosclerotic lesions that cause sudden death may not be the same as those for which the patient has been listed for relief of angina.3 Lastly, operative death rates for elective surgery of 1%–2%4 mean a proportion of patients die as a result of the procedure itself.
We have compared the mortality and myocardial infarction risk of
Relevant Article
CiteULike 
Complore 
Connotea 
Del.icio.us 
Digg 
Reddit 
Technorati What's this?
J Epidemiol Community Health 2002 56: 401.
- Full Text
- Full Text (PDF)
- Submit a response
- Alert me when this article is cited
- Alert me when eLetters are posted
- Alert me if a correction is posted
Services
- Email this link to a friend
- Similar articles in this journal
- Similar articles in PubMed
- Add article to my folders
- Download to citation manager
- Request Permissions
Citing Articles
Google Scholar
PubMed
Topic Collections
Bookmark with
Register for free content
The full back archive is now available for all BMJ Journals. Institutional subscribers may access the entire archive as part of their subscription. Personal subscribers will also have access to all content when logged in. Non-subscribers who register have free access to all articles published before 2006 right back to volume 1 issue 1. Register here to access the free archive of all BMJ Journals.
Don't forget to sign up for content alerts so you keep up to date with all the articles as they are published.
