"Kissing" stents improve treatment of branch-point plaque
According to a recently published report in Catheterization and Cardiovascular Interventions: Journal of the Society for Cardiovascular Angiography and Interventions, a technique that uses side-by-side stents at an arterial branch point of a heart is improving treatment of atherosclerotic plague in between a main coronary artery and side vessels.
Previous techniques have been plagued by complexity or high rates of arterial re-narrowing, but this new technique, developed by Samin K. Sharma, MD, who directs the cardiac catheterization laboratory at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City, has helped to overcome these problems, the report said.
In the initial 200 patients, the side-by-side stents procedure was 100 percent successful in the main artery and 99 percent successful in the side branch, and took just 36 minutes to perform. Of the patients, 5 percent had major cardiovascular complications within a month and 4 percent needed another procedure to open the treated artery after nine months, the report said.
Previous techniques have been plagued by complexity or high rates of arterial re-narrowing, but this new technique, developed by Samin K. Sharma, MD, who directs the cardiac catheterization laboratory at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City, has helped to overcome these problems, the report said.
In the initial 200 patients, the side-by-side stents procedure was 100 percent successful in the main artery and 99 percent successful in the side branch, and took just 36 minutes to perform. Of the patients, 5 percent had major cardiovascular complications within a month and 4 percent needed another procedure to open the treated artery after nine months, the report said.