April 2006
|Volume 18 Issue 4
The use of a second 0.014 inch coronary guidewire, along with the one being used to advance balloons or stents inside the coronary arteries during percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI), sometimes helps to address complex lesions — a method known a…
Recently, a number of clinical studies demonstrated that distal embolization occurs routinely during percutaneous coronary interventions (PCI) — not only on saphenous vein grafts, but also on native coronary arteries.1–9 During primary PCI, embolizat…
Accelerated allograft vasculopathy in cardiac transplant recipients occurs commonly five or more years after transplantation and limits patient survival.1,2
Unlike native atherosclerosis, this peculiar vasculopathy has a diffuse pattern of coronary…
Percutaneous coronary intervention has revolutionized the management of coronary artery disease since its inception in 1977. Initial problems with acute vessel closure were largely solved with the advent of stenting.1 Recurrent stenosis and/or occlus…
Drug-eluting stents have ushered in a new era in interventional cardiology with the availability of sirolimus-eluting Cypher™ (Cordis Corp., Miami, Florida) and paclitaxel-eluting Taxus® (Boston Scientific Corp., Natick, Massachusetts) stents which h…
Coronary perforation is a rare but potentially life-threatening complication of percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI). As an increasing number of complex PCI procedures are undertaken with aggressive anticoagulation and antiplatelet therapy, a hig…
Intracoronary radiation therapy (ICRT) for in-stent restenosis within bare metal stents substantially reduces the risk of recurrence.1–3 However, target vessel failure remains a significant clinical problem for some patients. A higher delivered radia…
Case Example. A 56-year-old man was admitted to the hospital complaining of dull, retrosternal chest pain that had lasted for 2 hours at rest. Over the previous 2 months, he had experienced exertional chest pain episodes that were increasing in frequ…
von Willebrand disease (vWD) is one of the more common inherited bleeding disorders, with an incidence of up to 1% in the general population.1–3 Along the clinical spectrum are patients without any bleeding manifestations who are incidentally discove…
Case Report. A 60-year-old male presented to the emergency department complaining of acute onset of precordial pain radiating to the left arm and neck. He denied any recent symptoms of exertional or nonexertional chest pain. The patient had undergone…