EXCEL trial of PCI vs CABG Author withdraws his authorship from the NEJM paper citing a dangerous corruption of the results against the superior results of CABG

David Taggart, MD, PhD (University of Oxford, England), the chairman of the EXCEL surgical committee during the design and recruitment phase of the trial, believes the investigators downplayed the increased risk of all-cause mortality with PCI and oversold the reduced risk of the study’s primary composite endpoint of death, stroke, and MI, particularly since the benefit was largely driven by a higher risk of periprocedural MIs in the CABG arm. 

“I found it worrying that there seemed to be a strong signal here and I don’t think that was accurately reflected in the New England Journal of Medicine paper,” Taggart told TCTMD. “We’re not talking about two tablets for a headache. We’re talking about people dying. The data are the data, and that’s what the data show.