This is only interesting in the possible prevention of cardiovascular events in persons with diabetes. So don't go down this route unless your doctor agrees. Alternative medicine usually is quackery until it is proven to work, then it is no longer alternative, just regular medicine.
http://www.medpagetoday.com/Cardiology/CardioBrief/53754?xid=nl_mpt_DHE_2015-09-29&eun=g424561d0r
The National Institutes of Health is giving money to support the
planning of a second trial to test the potential role of chelation
therapy in treating patients with myocardial infarction.
The first Trial to Assess Chelation Therapy (TACT) was
extremely controversial.
It was funded by the NIH more than a dozen years ago as part of an
initiative to study alternative medicine. Chelation therapy with EDTA to
remove heavy metals from the blood in order to treat coronary disease
has been around -- and provoked criticism -- since the 1950s. Until TACT
the mainstream medical community had completely dismissed chelation
therapy.
TACT was a double-blind trial testing active or placebo
infusions of chelation in 1,708 stable patients with a history of MI. In
the chelation group there was
a modest but statistically significant
reduction in the primary endpoint of the trial -- the composite of
death, MI, stroke, coronary revascularization, or hospitalization for
angina (26% vs 30%, HR 0.82, CI 0.69-0.99,
P=0.035).
T
he rationale for TACT2 is based on the observation in the earlier
study that nearly all the benefit occurred in the subgroup of 633
patients who had diabetes. For this group there was a highly significant
41% reduction in the primary endpoint (25% vs 38%, HR 0.59, CI
0.44-0.79,
P<0.001), as well as a 43% reduction in overall mortality and a 52% reduction in recurrent MI.
To followup on these findings the National Center for Complementary
and Integrative Health (NCCIH) has now awarded $800,000 to initiate
planning for TACT2. "A subgroup analysis of the original trial results
suggests major benefit in diabetics with cardiovascular disease. The
disease burden in this group of patients is devastating, so a
replication of these findings is of some urgency," said Josephine P.
Briggs, the Director of the National Center for Complementary and
Integrative Health, in an NIH press release.
"The hallmark of science is the ability to replicate results," said the study chairman,
Gervasio Lamas, MD,
of the Mount Sinai Medical Center in Miami Beach, Fla. "Unless we can
show a consistent effect across the two TACT Trials and establish a
similar mechanism to deliver the treatment safely, it will be difficult
for chelation to enter the mainstream of other cardiovascular
therapies."
Eugene Braunwald, MD,
gave a strong endorsement to TACT2 in the press release: "The results
of TACT were both surprising and intriguing. I am very pleased that
TACT2 is building on these findings to determine if they can be
replicated in diabetic patients who have experienced a myocardial
infarction -- a particularly high risk group of patients in need of
effective therapy."
