McMaster professor of medicine Deborah Cook, and other Canadian researchers, have shown a costly diagnostic and treatment tool, assumed to raise survival rates in many hospital settings, provided no benefit to patients facing major non-cardiac surgery.

Dean Sandham of the University of Calgary's medical school, led the team that showed using pulmonary-artery catheters in older patients about to undergo such surgery does not raise their likelihood of surviving and, in fact, raises their risk of a life-threatening blood clot in the lungs.

“We can't afford to use our health-care resources on things that aren't helpful,” he said.

The findings of their 10-year study, published in today's New England Journal of Medicine, contradict what, for some time, was considered a given: that high-risk surgery patients were less likely to die if a pulmonary-artery catheter was inserted before they went under the knife.

“This will have a very large impact on patient care,” said Cook, chair of the Canadian critical care clinical trials group.

“This is truly a landmark study. It shows clearly that, in the population tested …, there's no evidence of any benefit of having the pulmonary-artery catheter.”

Click here for the story in The Toronto Star.