Every year, 60,000 people in the UK are diagnosed with heart failure, and many are treated with stents. It’s in a large new study published in the New England Journal of Medicine that my colleagues and I discovered that these procedures are unnecessary.
Heart failure is where the heart muscle becomes weakened, leading to symptoms of severe breathlessness that may cause premature death. The most common cause is blocked blood vessels that reduce blood supply to the heart muscle. This is known as coronary artery disease.