REMINDER: OR-Live Presents: Minimally Invasive Abdominal Aortic Aneurysm Repair, St. Mary’s Medical Center to Feature New High-Tech Endovascular Surgery Suite
St. Mary’s Medical Center in Duluth, MN, will broadcast a minimally invasive vascular surgery, live on www.OR-Live.com Thursday, June 28, 2007, at 6:30 p.m. The public will be able to watch doctors perform an endovascular abdominal aortic aneurysm repair, which involves inserting a special stent to prevent a bulging artery in the abdomen from rupturing.
Duluth Clinic vascular surgeons Christopher DeMaioribus, MD, and Christopher Bunch, MD, will perform the live procedure. Duluth Clinic cardiothoracic surgeons John Fetter, MD, and SubbaReddy Konda, MBBS, will help explain the surgery and answer questions as they are e-mailed by viewers.
Dr. DeMaioribus says he hopes the live webcast will help to educate patients about the risks for developing an abdominal aortic aneurysm and the benefits of new minimally invasive techniques to repair the potentially life-threatening problem. “Not only is hospital time diminished, but the magnitude of the operation on people is much less, so they are able to resume normal activities much quicker,” he explains.
The aorta is the largest blood vessel in the body, running from the heart down through the chest and abdomen before it divides into the arteries that flow into each leg. For some people, the aortic wall weakens and degenerates. This causes the aorta to balloon out, forming an aneurysm.
Men are five times more likely than women to develop an abdominal aortic aneurysm (AAA). Other risk factors include smoking, family history and age. In most cases, an AAA does not cause any symptoms. It’s often caught during a screening test, like an ultrasound or MRI, for a separate health concern. If the abdominal aneurysm ruptures, it will be fatal without emergency surgery.
That rupture can be prevented through a minimally invasive or “endovascular” technique, when it’s appropriate for the patient. The surgeon inserts a catheter into a blood vessel through a small incision in the groin. The doctor can use this pathway to place a fabric-lined stent, called an endograft, into the aorta where the bulge is occurring.
“When we do those procedures open, people are generally in the hospital for six days and it takes them several months to completely recover,” says Dr. DeMaioribus. “When we do that as an endovascular procedure, they go home the next day and they really don’t have much of a recovery time except for time for the small groin incisions to heal.”
This technique requires advanced imaging capabilities so the surgeons can see the blood vessels as they work. St. Mary’s Medical Center has a new, state-of-the-art surgical suite that allows for both endovascular procedures and emergency open surgeries when necessary.
“It provides our region with the ability to perform all different kinds of vascular care,” says Dr. DeMaioribus. “It’s procedures that in the past may have had to been sent to the Twin Cities, but now we have the ability to do everything here.”
The term endovascular means “inside blood vessels.” A stent graft is a flexible tube of material — usually teflon (polytetrafluoroethylene) or dacron (polyethylene) — attached to an outer skeleton of metal (nickel-titanium or steel) struts, or stents. The procedure to place an endovascular stent graft into an aortic aneurysm begins by making small incisions, one in each groin, to allow access to the femoral arteries. The stent graft comes compressed on a small diameter catheter which is then placed into the femoral artery and passed into the aneurysm. After it is properly positioned within the aorta, the graft is opened. The metal stents then expand and seal the graft against the aorta above the aneurysm and against the iliac arteries (between the aorta and femoral arteries) below the aneurysm. All of the blood flow in the aorta then goes through the graft, and the weakened walls of the aneurysm are no longer exposed to the arterial blood pressure, removing the risk of aneurysm rupture.
Visit: http://www.or-live.com/duluthclinic/1756 now to learn more and view a program preview. VNR http://or-live.com/rams/she-1756-mkw-q.ram
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