Coronary Angioplasty To the Editor: We read with great interest the recent article by ten Berg et al1 on oral anticoagulant therapy during and after coronary angioplasty. In previous trials on late restenosis after percutaneous transluminal coronary angioplasty (PTCA), oral anticoagulants were not more effective than aspirin as adjunctive treatment after PTCA. However, in those trials, anticoag...

The use of percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI) to treat ischemic coronary artery disease (CAD) has expanded dramatically over the past three decades. Coronary balloon angioplasty, or percutaneous transluminal coronary angioplasty (PTCA), was first performed by Andreas Gruentzig in 1977 using a fixed-wire balloon catheter. The procedure was initially limited to the fewer than 10% of patient...

While the author's opening statement is certainly an overembellishment, one should not minimize the importance of cardiac catheterization, for it has facilitated intensive investigation into the physiology and anatomy of the entire circulatory system. Dr. Clark's book, Coronary Angioplasty, is broad in its scope. It deals with numerous concerns particular to cardiac catheterization: selection o...

T he application of a catheter-based approach to the treatment of arterial occlusion of the lower extremities was proposed by Dotter and Judkins1 nearly 30 years ago; 13 years later, Gruentzig2 demonstrated that similar techniques could be used to achieve nonoperative revascularization in patients with obstructed coronary arteries. Before even one decade had elapsed following Gruentzig's semina...

BACKGROUND Treatment of instent restenosis after carotid artery stenting because of circumferential or calcified lesions can be difficult and refractory to conventional balloon angioplasty. We describe the off-label use of a cardiac scoring balloon that was used for lesions refractory to angioplasty with other balloons. CASE DESCRIPTIONS Two patients with a history of carotid artery stenting ...

The introduction of percutaneous transluminal coronary angioplasty (PTCA) by Andreas Gruentzig was a game changer for coronary revascularization (1). However, PTCA is associated with significant rates of acute closure and restenosis resulting from vascular recoil, neointimal hyperplasia, and negative remodeling. Bare-metal stents (BMS) effectively treat acute closure and limit restenosis by pre...

Since the introduction of coronary artery bypass grafting (CABG) in 1967, and percutaneous transluminal coronary angioplasty (PTCA) 10 years later, several major clinical trials have been conducted comparing the two therapeutic strategies, such as the Bypass Angioplasty Revascularization Investigation (BARI) (1) and the Coronary Angioplasty versus Bypass Revascularization Investigation (CABRI) ...

In 1974, at the Medical Policlinic of the University of Zürich, German-born physician-scientist Andreas Grüntzig (1939-1985) for the first time applied a balloon-tipped catheter to re-open a severely stenosed femoral artery, a procedure, which he initially called "percutaneous transluminal dilatation". Balloon angioplasty as a therapy of atherosclerotic vascular disease, for which Grüntzig and ...

Percutaneous Transluminal Coronary Angioplasty, henceforth (PTCA) for patients with acute myocardial infarction (AMI)—a high-tech treatment—is more frequently used in Japan than in other developed countries. This paper adopts the two-phase model to examine whether the high PTCA use is driven by the self-interest of physicians, or by behavioral character. After controlling for a patient’s detail...

We report the first case of myocardial abscess directly related to percutaneous transluminal angioplasty (PTCA). Infectious complications of PTCA are very rare and limited to a few cases of groin infection and septic endarteritis most often after repeated procedures. In our patient, a problematic and repeated procedure probably led to a direct colonization and subsequent infection of an intimal...