A Day In The Operating Room — Time Warps For A Cardiac Bypass Patient

Delving into the 4 months I spent shadowing a Cardiothoracic surgeon, who I will not name, will delineate a picture of Pakistan’s medical care sector that is astoundingly perturbing but simultaneously essential to highlight.

 Once scary, heart bypass surgery has become common and safer

Coronary artery bypass graft surgery — or CABG, pronounced “cabbage” — is one of the best known, most studied and most effective surgeries of the modern age. “It’s a very safe operation,” says Timothy Gardner, past president of the American Heart Association. “It has evolved and improved every decade,” Gardner says. Over the years, surgeons have continually gotten better at the complex dance of the two-to-three-hour procedure.

Angioplasty vs. Bypass Surgery for Coronary Artery Disease

Coronary artery disease (CAD) is a disease caused by "hardening" (termed atherosclerosis) of the coronary arteries on the surface of the heart. CAD is the leading cause of death for both men and women in the United States.

Coronary Artery Bypass Grafting

CABG is a surgical procedure that uses veins from the leg or arteries from another part of the body to reroute blood around a blockage in the arteries that supply the heart with blood and oxygen (coronary arteries).

Coronary stenting versus coronary bypass surgery in patients with multiple vessel disease and significant proximal LAD stenosis: results from the ERACI II study

Patients with multivessel disease and significant disease of the proximal LAD randomly assigned in the ERACI II trial to PCI or CABG had similar survival and survival with freedom from myocardial infarction at long term follow up. Repeat revascularisation procedures were higher in the PCI group.

Heart bypass surgery or stents? Depends on patient

The average person with multiple diseased arteries in the heart does slightly better following coronary artery bypass surgery than after having stents inserted, a new study suggests, but the optimal procedure varies by patient. Researchers found slightly more heart patients survived at least five years after bypass surgery - 74 percent, versus 72 percent of those who had a stenting procedure, known as angioplasty. However, people who had no diabetes or heart failure and were non-smokers tended to have better outcomes with angioplasty than with more invasive surgery, the study team reported Monday in the Annals of Internal Medicine.

How Does Bypass Surgery Work?

A coronary bypass provides a detour for blood on its way to the heart. The creation of such an indirect route is necessary when one of the heart’s arteries becomes clogged with fat and cholesterol, a condition that can cause symptoms ranging from mild chest pains to massive fatal heart attacks. The operation is one of the most common major medical procedures in the United States, with over 500,000 of the surgeries performed every year.

Recent study shows treatment works to reduce the need for cardiac stents and bypass surgeries

The long-awaited study that looked at an inexpensive, non-invasive way to treat the No. 1 killer in America, heart disease, has been completed and it proved that the treatment works.