Everyday, heart disease patients and doctors decide between treating blocked arteries with bypass surgery or less-invasive percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI, including stenting and balloon angioplasty). New evidence reveals bypass surgery carries a higher long-term survival rate, according to research presented today at a meeting of the American College of Cardiology. The study analyzed 190,000 patients across the US, comparing bypass surgery to PCI. Patients who underwent PCI had a higher death rate in the first four years after treatment than those who had bypass surgery (20.8 percent and 16.41 percent, respectively). “Our study is the most general one ever done because it uses data from across the whole country. It is also much larger than any other study,” said William S. Weintraub, the study’s lead investigator. “Combining data from several large databases, we found that survival was better with coronary surgery than percutaneous coronary intervention.”