A recent article in the financial press (Bloomberg) drew wide attention to inappropriate and excessive use of stents in patients with coronary artery disease (disease in the vessels that supply blood to the heart). Stents are tiny mesh tubes placed in a diseased coronary artery to “prop” it open after a narrowed segment of it has been expanded by a balloon. (more…)
Pulmonary embolism is a common and dangerous condition that occurs when blood clots (deep venous thrombosis, or, DVT) break loose and travel from where the clots formed—mostly the leg veins (or, uncommonly, veins elsewhere)—to the pulmonary arteries, which conduct blood from the heart to the lungs. Sometimes these clots are small and may not cause clinical symptoms, because the surface area of the lungs, when opened out, would cover the surface of two tennis courts! However, occasionally, a pulmonary embolism can be massive and rapidly fatal. (more…)
By Jeffrey M. Levine, MD, AGSF, and Michael Cioroiu, MD, FACS, CWS
Peripheral arterial disease (PAD) of the lower limbs, in which plaque builds up in the arteries that carry blood to the legs, is an often-overlooked cause of poor wound healing, particularly in elderly individuals. While PAD affects roughly 12% to 14% of the general population, it increases with age, affecting up to 20% of patients older than 75 years. (more…)
On Tuesday, March 5 a team of physicians from Roosevelt Hospital’s Center for Endovascular Surgery performed the first of a series of procedures to treat a 2-year-old boy from the Dominican Republic who was born with a disfiguring lesion on his face.
The 1½-hour procedure was the first of three or four that Alejandro Berenstein, MD, Director of the Hyman-Newman Institute for Neurology and Neurosurgery and his comprehensive team will perform on toddler Joel De La Rosa. (more…)