California ? Most elective angioplasties are done without checking to see whether they are needed by doing a noninvasive stress test, an analysis has found.

As a result, the study suggests, some angioplasties are done on patients for whom the risk outweighs the benefit, leading to costly, inappropriate invasive procedures.

“We have a system that pays doctors equally for inappropriate procedures as appropriate procedures,” said senior author Rita Redberg, a professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco.

The study is published today in the Journal of the American Medical Association.