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Heart Bypass Linked to Lingering Brain Damage

The New England Journal of Medicine recently reported that Heart Bypass surgery causes serious, lingering brain damage in as many as 25,000 Americans per year.

Six percent of people undergoing Heart Bypass surgery suffer significant, perhaps permanent, brain damage. “That's a frightening figure for an elective procedure,” said the director of the study, Dr. Dennis Mangano of the San Francisco Veterans Affairs Medical Center.

Worldwide, 800,000 bypass surgeries are done each year with 400,000 in the United States. Doctors believe the surgery knocks loose tiny bits of fatty deposits that then float in the bloodstream until they block the small vessels of the brain, starving it of oxygen.

Dr. Philip Wolf, of Boston University, a stroke specialist not involved in the study, called the degree of brain damage “a gross underestimation, because these people were not seen systematically by a neurologist. It must be the tip of the iceberg.”