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| How do coronary stents work? |
| John Matson, Scientific American |
| 3/18/2010 |
| Former President Bill Clinton received two stents in one of his coronary arteries [in mid-February] at a New York City hospital, according to a prepared statement by his adviser Douglas Band. Clinton, who underwent a quadruple bypass in 2004, left New York–Presbyterian Hospital on Friday. Coronary stents are mesh scaffolds that are threaded into arteries and then expanded, usually by inflating a balloon inside the stent, to hold a previously plaque-clogged vessel open. Stents are often employed following angioplasty, in which an unstented balloon is first inflated to widen a clogged or narrowed artery; the stent is then inserted and expanded by another balloon to keep the vessel from renarrowing. Direct stenting [above] opens the artery and implants the stent in one step. A 2007 study in The New England Journal of Medicine cast doubt on the benefits of stents in typical heart-disease patients, but stenting remains a common medical procedure. According to The Wall Street Journal, about one million stents are implanted in the U.S. each year. For original article AND illustrations, click here |
| Additional Information: http://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/post.cfm?id=how-do-coronary-stents-work-2010-02-12 |