Category Archives: Intravascular Guidance

Fractional Flow Reserve and Stents

William Fearon MDFAMEous 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

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Filed under FAME I / FAME II, FFR, Interviews

Kick-Ass Stents

XIENCE V StentI wrote about this issue over a month ago (see “To Stent or Not to Stent: That is the Question!“) but today’s newspapers are filled once again with the sad story of Maryland cardiologist Dr. Mark Midei, St. Joseph’s Medical Center and the alleged hundreds of unnecessary stents placed in patients who didn’t need them. This sudden renewed interest comes as the Senate investigational report by Senators Baucus and Grassley into this matter was made available — and into the mix of the story was added a pig roast, the Philadelphia mob, Abbott Vascular’s celebration of Midei implanting 30 of their stents in a single day and an email from a company executive, suggesting that someone take a Baltimore Sun reporter outside and “kick his ass!” Continue reading

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Filed under FAME I / FAME II, FFR, Media Coverage, Stent