Angioplasty
Angioplasty is a procedure to restore blood flow through the artery. You have angioplasty in a hospital. The doctor threads a thin tube through a blood vessel in the arm or groin up to the involved site in the artery. The tube has a tiny balloon on the end. Angioplasty, also known as balloon angioplasty and percutaneous transluminal angioplasty, is a minimally invasive, endovascular procedure to widen narrowed or obstructed arteries or veins, typically to treat arterial atherosclerosis.
A deflated balloon attached to a catheter (a balloon catheter) is passed over a guide-wire into the narrowed vessel and then inflated to a fixed size. The balloon forces expansion of the blood vessel and the surrounding muscular wall, allowing an improved blood flow. A stent may be inserted at the time of ballooning to ensure the vessel remains open, and the balloon is then deflated and withdrawn. Angioplasty has come to include all manner of vascular interventions that are typically performed percutaneously.
The word is composed of the combining forms of the Greek words ἀγγεῖον angeîon “vessel” or “cavity” (of the human body) and πλάσσω plássō “form” or “mould”.
Angioplasty was first described by the US interventional radiologist Charles Dotter in 1964. Dr. Dotter pioneered modern medicine with the invention of angioplasty and the catheter-delivered stent, which were first used to treat peripheral arterial disease. On January 16, 1964, Dotter percutaneously dilated a tight, localized stenosis of the subsartorial artery in an 82-year-old woman with painful leg ischemia and gangrene who refused leg amputation.
After successful dilation of the stenosis with a guide wire and coaxial Teflon catheters, the circulation returned to her leg. The dilated artery stayed open until her death from pneumonia two and a half years later. Charles Dotter is commonly known as the “Father of Interventional Radiology” and was nominated for the Nobel Prize in medicine in 1978.
The first percutaneous coronary angioplasty on an awake patient was performed in Zurich by the German cardiologist Andreas Gruentzig on September 16, 1977.
Dr. Simon H. Stertzer was the first to perform coronary angioplasty in the United States on March 1, 1978 at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York. That same day, Dr. Richard K. Myler of St. Mary’s Hospital in San Francisco performed the second coronary angioplasty in the United States.
The first coronary angioplasty with a drug delivery stent system was performed by Dr. Stertzer and Dr. Luis de la Fuente, at the Instituto Argentino de Diagnóstico y Tratamiento (English: Argentina Institute of Diagnosis and Treatment) in Buenos Aires, in 1999.
Ingemar Henry Lundquist invented the over-the-wire balloon catheter that is now used in the majority of angioplasty procedures in the world.