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Abbott
Vulnerable Plaque Study Completes Enrollment |
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| August 30, 2006 -- Abbott has completed enrollment of 700 stent patients in the U.S. and Europe. Using blood tests and a unique intravascular ultrasound imaging system, the PROSPECT study, headed by Dr. Gregg Stone of Columbia University Medical Center in New York, will attempt to more clearly define who is at risk for a heart attack. PROSPECT stands for "Providing Regional Observations to Study Predictors of Events in the Coronary Tree", and is using the Volcano Therapeutics IVUS system to look at a certain type of plaque, called "vulnerable plaque". It is currently thought by many researchers that heart attacks are much more often caused not by the gradual building up of plaque that obstructs the blood flow in coronary arteries, but by a specific type of plaque made of a lipid-rich mass that is underneath a very thin fibrous cap on the wall of the artery. When this cap ruptures, the lipid-rich cells flow into the blood stream and begin clotting, suddenly and unexpectedly blocking the artery. This type of vulnerable plaque can currently only be seen using the most advanced intravascular ultrasound (IVUS) imaging equipment -- neither a stress test nor an angiogram reveals "vulnerable plaque". In the future angiograms made noninvasively with multidetector CT (MDCT or MSCT) or magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) may be able to detect this type of plaque, but for now only IVUS, which requires threading a catheter from a small puncture in the femoral artery and up into the coronaries, similar to an angioplasty, can "see" and differentiate vulnerable plaque from the surrounding tissue. The study is being done with patients who are also receiving a stent, so the additional IVUS imaging requires only slipping an IVUS catheter over the same wire that the stent is delivered on and a few minutes of imaging. Abbott took over this study as part of its acquisition of Guidant Corporation's vascular division. related
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