Sunday 24 July 2011

Patients vs. cardiologists #twitjc week 7

Thanks again to @fidouglas and @silv24 for organising this week's Twitter Journal Club on a paper about the "beliefs" of cardiologists and their patients on the use of percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI) - stents / angioplasty.

The paper by researchers from Baystate Medical Center, Springfield, Massachusetts [1] found that patients were far more optimistic that PCI would reduce their chances of myocardial infarction or death.

My thoughts (5 minutes before the Twitter Journal Club discussion starts) are that it is an interesting paper but it is from one institution with a particularly opaque consent form and the surveys of patients and cardiologists are unvalidated survey tools. It suggests that patients in this facility are not fully informed of the use of PCI before they undergo cardiac catheterisation. To get them fully informed would be a challenge.

1. Rothberg MB, Sivalingam SK, Ashraf J, Visintainer P, Joelson J, Kleppel R, Vallurupalli N, Schweiger MJ. Patients' and Cardiologists' Perceptions of the Benefits of Percutaneous Coronary Intervention for Stable Coronary Disease. Annals of Internal Medicine 2010;153(5):307 -313.[cited 2011 Jul 24 ] Available from: http://www.annals.org/content/153/5/307.abstract

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