Lead researcher Dr Gervasio Lamas said chelation therapy, in which doctors give patients high-dose vitamins along with special infusions that seek to leach heavy metals from the body, is still not recommended. ‘These findings should stimulate further research, but are not by themselves sufficient to recommend the routine use of chelation therapy and high-dose vitamins in most patients,’ said the chief of the Columbia University Division of Cardiology, Mount Sinai Medical Centre, Miami Beach.
Funded by the US National Institutes of Health, the researchers examined whether chelation therapy might help patients who’d suffered a heart attack, and presented their findings at the American College of Cardiology (ACC) annual meeting in San Francisco. The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is yet to approve the expensive treatment, which involves dozens of gruelling infusions conducted over a period of years, for heart patients.
Because chelation therapy also involves daily high-dose vitamins and minerals, Lamas explained that the new analysis tried to separate out the effects of the supplements from that of the chelation itself, finding that a group of participants who took daily high-dose vitamins and minerals alone had experienced no benefit. ‘We cannot recommend high-dose oral vitamins and minerals as adjunct therapy for people who have had [heart attacks],’ he said.
However, in another group who took vitamins and minerals in combination with chelation therapy, 6% fewer patients experienced some kind of cardiovascular event, such as heart attack, stroke or hospitalization for angina (chest pain), than the 32% seen among those who got placebo/placebo therapy only. Lamas commented, ‘The message really is a cautious message. We brought something that has been an alternative medicine treatment into the realm of scientific inquiry and found unexpected results that may merit future research. However, we don’t think that the results of any single trial are enough to carry this novel hypothesis into daily use for patients.’