Traditional and current perception for benefit of percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI) is that patients with stable angina will obtain symptom relief as well as improved exercise capacity after percutaneous revascularization. This common clinical perception is put to test in the ORBITA trial, the first blinded, randomized placebo-controlled clinical study ever conducted.Areas covered: Coronary artery disease, percutaneous coronary intervention, medical therapy.Expert Commentary: The authors found no significant improvement in exercise time, functional status, angina relief and quality of life in the PCI group compared with placebo. A possible explanation for this neutral outcome is that PCI is overvalued in symptom relief and to some extent explained by placebo effects or transient non-cardiac causes of chest pain. However, the chosen exercise tolerance improvement may have been too optimistic in a population with good functional capacity. Also PCI was anatomic and not functional driven, and follow-up duration may have been to short to wear off the placebo effect. While the evidence is not sufficient to alter revascularization guidelines, the message of this 200-patient, high-quality study is potent and will reverberate throughout the cardiology community and warrants further study.
Keywords: Chest pain; exercise capacity; percutaneous coronary intervention; placebo; revascularization; sham.