Coronary Heart Disease: Surgical Procedures

Transcript

Well, as I mentioned, one of the diagnostic tools is an angiogram. If that test shows a blockage, then you can have what we call an angioplasty, which is fixing the blockage. And nowadays, most of the time after doing what we call a balloon angioplasty, we put in a stent to keep that artery open longer term. So stenting may become necessary. Sometimes if things go wrong during an angiogram or during an angioplasty, we may need surgeon revascularization where a surgeon creates bypasses or other paths for the blood flow to occur. A bypass is also often employed when stents are not a good option, where there’s multiple blockages or blockages in a very serious area where surgery is the better option.