WARNING!! Pay no attention to the chelation ads appearing on this page!
The results of a recent randomized clinical study comparing intravenous chelation therapy to placebo therapy, published in the The Journal of the American Medical Association, confirms that chelation offers no benefit to patients with coronary artery disease and stable angina.
This trial - the Program to Assess Alternative Treatment Strategies to Achieve Cardiac Health (PATCH) trial, conducted in Calgary - enrolled 84 patients with documented coronary artery disease, all of whom had evidence of cardiac ischemia (i.e., angina) during treadmill testing despite optimal medical therapy. The patients were randomized to receive either a course of intravenous chelation therapy with EDTA, or therapy with intravenous placebo.
Those who received chelation were treated according to the recommendations of the American College for Advancement in Medicine (noted proponents of chelation therapy): they received 40mg/kg of EDTA, administered intravenously over 3 hours, twice per week for 15 weeks, followed by monthly treatments for 3 months. Those treated with placebo received similar intravenous infusions with an inactive substance.
At the end of the study, patients receiving chelation showed no improvement over those receiving placebo as measured by their exercise time to cardiac ischemia, and by quality of life scales. It is noteworthy that patients in both groups improved - but the improvement in the chelation group was the same as the improvement in the placebo group; the chelation itself led to no additional improvement. (Improvement in placebo patients - commonly referred to as the placebo effect -is particularly common in angina trials. Such improvement is attributed in part to the close medical care that patients enrolled in clinical trials tend to receive, as well as a training effect from repeated exercise.)
DrRich comments:
At the risk of being labeled a close-minded, guild-beholden pawn of the medical-industrial establishment, DrRich points out the following truth: once again, a well-designed, fairly conducted randomized trial has failed to show any benefit for chelation therapy. After several such trials, there remains no objective evidence that chelation therapy works.
This truth should be of interest to many of you who are spending your hard-earned money on chelation therapy. Indeed, recent data shows that up to 8% of patients undergoing more traditional cardiac therapy (such as angioplasty) are also getting chelation therapy on the side. (This astoundingly high percentage is a tribute to the marketing acumen of purveyors of chelation, some of whom choose to spend their advertising dollars on this very website, much to DrRich's chagrin.)
Randomized trials, of course, are a tool of hard science, and many proponents of alternative medicine entertain a worldview in which hard science has relatively little to do with describing the way things "really" are. To such folks as these, another mere negative randomized trial won't dent their faith in chelation (or in other nontraditional forms of treatment.) DrRich says to these folks: may God bless you in your endeavors, and as long as you don't spend my tax dollars on it, have at chelation as much as you like.
To the rest of you, those who hold some stock in scientifically conducted studies and in the utility of objective scientific evidence: think thrice before you spend your money on chelation therapy.
Click here for an article on an alternative form of angina treatment that actually does work.
