UK investigators' recent decision to call an early halt to enrollment in a major study comparing neurosurgical clipping to endovascular coil treatment of ruptured cerebral aneurysms may signal a significant change of practice habits in a critical area of neurology. The findings, if they're as good as they appear to be, could do to surgical clipping and endovascular coils what the BENESTENT trials of the early 1990s did to promote stenting over balloon angioplasty in patients with coronary artery disease.
Results of the International Subarachnoid Aneurysm Trial (ISAT) strongly favored coils. Co-principal investigator Andrew Molyneux, MD, announced the decision to halt the trial in a brief statement at last spring's...