ASTRAL enrolled 806 patients from 56 centres with a mean follow u

ASTRAL enrolled 806 patients from 56 centres with a mean follow up of 34 months (total follow up was 5 years reported for a small number of patients).3 The average degree of RAS was 76% and the 5-year

mortality in the whole group was 51%. Methodological issues that have been raised include: 1 ASTRAL recruited patients in whom there was ‘uncertainty about the value of revascularization  . . .’. This was considered a strength by the authors, because it represented the ‘real world’ situation. However, it may lead to an ascertainment bias in favour of medical therapy because patients with the highest grade of stenosis may not have been entered into the study but treated with revascularization. Adriamycin Finally, the lack of robust evidence for or against angioplasty use is further negated by the 9% perioperative complication rate and the 20% 1 month complication

rate in the intervention arm in ASTRAL. The DRASTIC study,5 the largest published RCT, enrolled 106 patients with hypertension, high-grade atherosclerotic RAS and a serum creatinine concentration buy MI-503 <200 µmol/L. Patients were randomly assigned to undergo percutaneous transluminal renal angioplasty (PTRA) or to receive antihypertensive drug therapy, followed by balloon angioplasty (if needed) at 3 months. Overall BP and renal function were similar in the two groups at 3 and 12 months, although angioplasty reduced the need for one additional daily antihypertensive agent. However, after subgroup analysis, it was found that in patients with bilateral stenoses, the creatinine clearance improved in the angioplasty group, but fell in patients assigned to the delayed intervention group. This was at a cost of 11% peri-procedural morbidity. A Scottish group reported a prospective randomized trial of percutaneous angioplasty versus medical therapy in patients with bilateral or unilateral atherosclerotic RAS and sustained hypertension.6 In the bilateral group (n = 28), the drop in systolic pressure was significantly larger following

angioplasty than following medical therapy, but diastolic pressure and creatinine Ribonuclease T1 after 24 months were not different with either intervention. In the unilateral group (n = 27), there was no difference in serum creatinine or BP control between angioplasty and medical therapy. This was at a cost of 25% peri-procedural morbidity. In the EMMA study reported by Plouin et al.,7 hypertensive patients were randomly assigned antihypertensive drug treatment (n = 26) or angioplasty (n = 23). They also found that BP at 6 months did not differ between control (141 ± 15/84 ± 11 mmHg) and angioplasty (140 ± 15/81 ± 9 mmHg) groups. Angioplasty reduced the requirement for antihypertensive therapy at the cost of some procedural morbidity of 25%. van der Ven et al.

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