A device from the company J&J buys can reduce chest pain

a Completely independent clinical trial researchers thought a heart device from Shockwave Medical, the company Johnson & Johnson is buying for $13 billion, could disprove. Ultimately, they provided some support for the usability of the device.

The data, presented Monday at the annual meeting of the American College of Cardiology and published in The Lancetcould strengthen the case for the device, which is available in Europe and Britain but was previously rejected by the US Food and Drug Administration.

But the results are also complicated, because while the study technically shows that the device reduced angina, the chest pain caused by heart disease, it also failed.

The device, called a coronary sinus reducer, is intended to reduce chest pain by forcing blood backward through the heart’s veins. The primary goal of the small trial was to use magnetic resonance imaging to see if this happened.