Experts

Chelation Therapy Shown to Help Heart Attack Survivors

By Cheri Cheng | Update Date: Mar 30, 2013 01:23 PM EDT

For decades, chelation therapy has been used to help heart attack survivors without any evidence that the treatment option actually works. Now, after a 10-year long clinical trial, researchers believe there is enough proof supporting the effectiveness of chelation therapy for heart patients. The study, which cost $31 million, silenced some critics of the therapy and revealed that the treatment option can in fact remove certain metals from the arteries and clear them up reducing the risk for heart attacks in heart patients.

The researchers from 134 different medical facilities decided to undergo this study after statistics revealed that more and more patients were opting for this very expensive treatment option. From 2002 to 2007, the number of patients receiving chelation therapy jumped by 68 percent, with roughly 111,000 patients choosing this option. The researchers administered either a placebo treatment option or a combination of vitamins, electrolytes and disodium EDTA to 1,708 patients who recently experienced a heart attack. These patients were at least 50-years-old. Both treatment options required 40 infusions that were given throughout the year. The researchers found that the chelation option lowered a patient's overall risk of heart complications.

"I can't overemphasize how unexpected these results were," the lead researcher, Dr. Gervasio Lamas said. Lamas is a cardiologist from Columbia University.

The patients who received chelation therapy had a six percent rate for a heart attack in comparison to the placebo patient's eight percent chance for a heart attack. However, the researchers did acknowledge the fact that the therapy is still not ready to be considered a real option until more research can be done.

"A lot of people thought this would be a good study because it would be a chance to disprove a therapy that had little support among mainstream academics. It's a terrific group of investigator who've addressed an interesting question, who've come up with a surprising result that nobody knows what to go with," Dr. Harlan Krumholz said. Krumholz is a cardiologist from Yale University and was not a part of the study.

"It's a type of medical quackery that has been around for many decades," Dr. Steven Nissen, who was not a part of the study, stated. Nissen is the chair of cardiovascular medicine at the Cleveland Clinic in Ohio. Nissen also criticized the study due to the fact that several patients did not finish the trial. In addition, some patients received treatment from different types of medical facilities, which might have played a huge factor in the success rate of the therapy. Even if the controversy behind the effectiveness of chelation therapy continues, this study might have dialed it down a notch.

The study was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association and it was funded by the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine and the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute.

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