What alternative therapies are there for patients with refractory angina (angina that does not respond to the usual medications)?
There are multiple ways to treat patients who have angina. One is medication. One is angioplasty with a stent usually. And the last is bypass surgery. And they’re all highly effective in relieving symptoms. So generally, we treat patients initially with medical therapy and see how they do. If that fails to control symptoms, then an angioplasty is frequently the next step, or bypass surgery if there are many severe blockages. And then patients generally do very well after that. However, there is a small percentage of patients who continue to have angina or redevelop angina and whom bypass surgery or angioplasty are no longer available for them because the blockages are not reachable by a bypass or reachable by a balloon catheter to open up the blockage. So for those patients, there are some newer ways to treat the problem that seem to be very interesting. There are new medications that are coming along. One of them has been recently released that seems to be effective in this group of p
