Monthly Archives: December 2010

FAMEous interventional cardiologist William Fearon of Stanford sat down with Angioplasty.Org recently to talk about a better way to judge if a patient might benefit from a stent. Instead of looking at the x-ray angiogram and saying, “That’s a 70% blockage — let’s put a stent in there and you’ll feel much better,” Dr. Fearon advocates the use of a thin pressure wire which actually measures the flow through the narrowing. The technology is called Fractional Flow Reserve or FFR.

Turns out that sometimes what looks like a blockage on the x-ray isn’t always restricting the flow enough to cause ischemia (reduced oxygen to the heart muscle which usually, but not always, results in angina). And vice-versa, sometimes ischemia/angina is being caused by an area that doesn’t look so bad on the angiogram. Continue reading →