A placebo-controlled experiment on symptoms in stable coronary disease
Research type
Research Study
Full title
Is there a difference between clinical angina and experimentally inducible angina? A placebo-controlled experiment on symptoms in stable coronary artery disease
IRAS ID
257148
Contact name
Rasha Al-Lamee
Contact email
Sponsor organisation
Joint Research Compliance Office, Imperial College London
Duration of Study in the UK
3 years, 2 months, 1 days
Research summary
Patients often experience chest pain when the heart is short of blood flow due to a narrowing in an artery. We call this symptom 'angina'. We can treat angina with tablets; but sometimes this is not enough, and so doctors open up the narrowing with a metal stent (angioplasty).
Unfortunately, some patients still have pains even after angioplasty. Perhaps the pain was not caused by the narrowing after all? There is currently no test to say that a patient's pain is actually caused by the narrowing rather than something else. As a result, cardiologists cannot tell whether angioplasty will alleviate the pain or not.
The principal aim of this study is to test whether we can identify which patients have chest pain that is truly caused by a narrowed artery.We will do this by temporarily restricting flow in arteries of patients about to have angioplasty for angina. Presumably, if the patient's angina was really caused by the narrowed artery, then restricting the flow should recreate the pain. However, if the narrowed artery was not the cause of their pain, any pain they feel during the experiment would be different in nature. A unique feature of my experiment is that it will be blinded, which means sometimes we really will restrict the flow and other times it will only be pretend (placebo). The pain should come with the real episodes and not the pretend ones. At the end of the experiment, all patients in the study will undergo angioplasty to open up the artery fully as they would in our normal practice.
This field of research could develop a test which could help doctors and patients decide in whom, and in which narrowed artery, stents would most help symptoms.
REC name
London - Central Research Ethics Committee
REC reference
19/LO/1194
Date of REC Opinion
11 Oct 2019
REC opinion
Further Information Favourable Opinion