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September 17, 2009 -- 2:00pm EDT Angioplasty Comes Home to San Francisco So next week thousands of interventional cardiologists will gather in San Francisco for the TCT, the largest meeting about angioplasty, stents and related procedures in the world. It's usually held in Washington, DC, but this year, it's SF. But what most of these cardiologists don't realize is that they will be coming home -- "home" being where the first coronary angioplasties were done. Many know that Andreas Gruentzig performed the first PTCA (coronary angioplasty done in a cath lab from a small incision in the leg artery) in Zurich in September of 1977. But earlier in the year he spent time with Dr. Richard Myler at St. Mary's Hospital in San Francisco, doing intraoperative angioplasties, performed during open heart bypass graft surgery, as a way of testing whether his novel idea might work. The story below, told by Richard Myler and Maria Schlumpf (Gruentzig's assistant) -- excerpted from my documentary, "PTCA: A History":
Richard Myler went on to perform the first PTCA in the U.S. in his cath lab in spring of 1978 -- on the same day, Simon Stertzer performed the procedure in his cath lab at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York. The two later joined forces at the San Francisco Heart Institute where I had the honor of working with them to produce live demonstration courses. Back then a good audience was 500 cardiologists. Next week over 10,000 will come home to San Francisco! |
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