Percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI) was introduced by Gruentzig as an alternative to bypass surgery and was originally applied for symptomatic patients with singlevessel disease. As technology advanced, angioplasty became a therapy for the more usual forms of multivessel disease. Randomized trials have justified the use of angioplasty in selected patients with multivessel disease with one ...

D uring the last 5 years, there has been a tremendous interest in the development of new devices for percutaneous treatment of peripheral and coronary artery obstructive arterial disease.1 As during the development of balloon angioplasty, many of these devices were first tested in peripheral arteries before their use in coronary arteries. Although this stage of new device development may no lon...

Since the early 1990s, with significant improvement in the procedural success of percutaneous coronary interventions (PCIs), there has been a concomitant reduction in the need for emergency coronary artery bypass graft surgery. This review article focuses on the need for on-site cardiac surgery in patients with acute myocardial infarction undergoing primary angioplasty at centers without on-sit...

The early and late results of percutaneous transluminal coronary angioplasty in elderly patients are well known, but although stent implantation has become the most frequent percutaneous coronary intervention in many centers, little information exists about its long-term outcome in elderly patients. The aim of this study was to evaluate the long-term clinical and angiographic follow-up results ...

INTRODUCTION The treatment of calcified coronary artery lesions is a challenge for percutaneous angioplasty. Rotational atherectomy is an established technique for the effective modification of these lesions prior to conventional angioplasty and stent implantation. Drug-eluting stents (DES) have shown encouraging results in complex lesions and high-risk patients. METHODS This retrospective st...

Coronary pseudoaneurysm usually occurs after catheter-based intervention as a result of traumatic dissection or perforation of a coronary artery in 4%-5% of cases. Here, we report the successful case of pseudoaneurysm occurring after percutaneous coronary angioplasty (PTCA) against the severely calcified coronary artery treated with off-pump long onlay patch bypass technique using internal thor...

The use of radial artery grafts for coronary bypass surgery is becoming more frequent. However, experience with percutaneous coronary intervention for radial artery graft failure is limited. We describe a patient with a radial artery graft in whom angina reappeared because of de novo stenosis in the graft. The patient was successfully treated with balloon angioplasty and stenting. At 6 months h...

Since the development of coronary angioplasty in the late 1970s, there have been a series of technical advancements that have improved the outcome of the procedure. Clearly, the biggest advance was to move from balloon angioplasty to intracoronary stenting and now to drug-eluting stents (DES).1,2 These advances have been shown to reduce in-hospital events and to dramatically lower the incidence...

Percutaneous coronary angioplasty is increasingly employed in the treatment of patients with complex coronary artery disease. Different steerable guide wires used to open occluded vessel and facilitate balloon and stent deployment. However, the guide-wire itself is not without hazard: it may perforate or dissect the vessel, but fracture or entrapment is uncommon. Its management depends on the c...