I recently saw couple of animations on Facebook that touched on an issue close to my heart (heh).
The first one shows a (new?) medical device/procedure removing a blood clot from a coronary artery.
The second one shows a nearly identical device clearing and removing what appears to be plaque deposits in a peripheral artery.
The reason this situation is of interest to me is that, approximately two years ago, kaylasmom underwent an angiogram (in response to whet turned out to be a mild heart attack), the results of which concluded that, due to the narrowness of her arteries, disqualified her as a candidate for either a balloon angioplasty and stent or a coronary bypass.
Seeing these animations has led me to wonder if kaylasmom’s problem may have a solution that is a bit more far-reaching than her daily doses of Clopidogrel and Isosorbide DN. I had always presumed in the past that trying to clear and remove arterial plaque was an unattainable dream, because of the risk of plaque particles escaping to get themselves hung up somewhere downstream and creating new sites for thromboses to grow and kill the patient.
Do[es] the device[s] in the animations have the potential for solving this problem? I DO recognize that the animation that shows a plaque being cleared and removed is in a peripheral vessel, and NOT in a coronary artery; however, this is not necessarily probative to a man whose wife’s cardiovascular health may hang in the balance.
I tried to make contact last week with the manufacturer via the “Contact” link on their webpage, providing a brief précis kaylasmom’s medical history, and inquiring if this is a solution to consider, but they have not yet responded. I’m going to be looking for this manufacturer’s phone number tomorrow, so I can ask them about this idea directly, but in the meantime, can an expert in the field(s) of cardiology and/or vascular surgery tell me whether this is simply a forlorn hope?