For the first time in Eastern India, a revolutionary new genre of bio-absorbable stents were recently implanted in a patient in Kolkata’s BM Birla Heart Research Centre.
BM Birla Heart Research Centre is a super speciality hospital dedicated exclusively to the diagnosis, treatment and research related to cardio-thoracic and vascular diseases. Angioplasty till date are done in a fashion where traditional stents when implanted in coronary arteries do their job of providing mechanical scaffold to the dilated coronary artery during an angioplasty, when it is needed in early months.
However, it continues to remains in the coronary artery there after forever, even when it is not required. This leaves a metal jacket in the dilated portion of the artery making it difficult to deal with, if another blockage develops in the same area, leaving no space at times to implant a bypass graft if surgery is contemplated nor space to put another metal stent inside previously placed stent.
The new bio-absorbable stent provides the mechanical support to the artery when it is required and then slowly dissolves away over a period of two years leaving native coronary artery with all its functionality.
This keeps the native coronary artery open for any possible treatment option like repeat stenting or bypass surgery in case blockages develop again at the same site. Five such stents called ABSORB biovascular Scaffold (BVS) were recently implanted during angioplasty of significant blockages in coronary arteries, at the Centre by Dr Anil Mishra, Medical Director, and Dr Dhiman Kahali, Consultant Cardiologist.
“This is next major leap into advancement for treatment of coronary artery blockages, which has come more than a decade after drug eluting stents came into clinical practice and is likely to revolutionise and become treatment of choice for coronary artery blockages,” said Dr Mishra.
EH News Bureau
