Bill,

The percentage of failures with stents is relatively low, particularly if the stent is the newer type that is medicated. The older stents were not medicated and required that the patient take blood thinners, some with nasty side effects, for the rest of the lives. The new ones allow the patient to take Plavix and aspirin, and in most instances the Plavix only has to be taken for 3 to 6 months, but the aspirins are forever.

Stents are for those individuals with early onset of coronary artery disease and made it possible to open those blockages without cracking open their chest and doing major surgery. Bypass surgery, which essentially is a procedure where a piece of vein from the patient's leg, or the mamory artery, is installed in place of the blocked coronary artery. While the procedure has really improved over the past few decades, it's still major surgery.

As for reversing the condition, that's really not possible. Most patients with significant coronary artery disease got that way from a high-fat, high-cholestoral, high-carbohydrate diet. You can change your eating habits and slow, and possibly stop any advancement of the condition, but nothing will reverse the damage and artery clogging that has taken place. Keep in mind that the artery clogging process takes lots of years, and once the arteries are narrowed down to where the blood cells have to line up in single file for the blood to flow to the heart muscle, a single, tiny clot could cause that flow to cease. This is why it's so important to stay on a regimen of aspirin, and Plavix if prescribed.

The only way to determine if you have a blockage is cardiac catherization. While you can have a heart scan performed, the test is not all that accurate, especially in women. I should know. Just last week my wife had a stent put in here left, anterior decending coronary artery, a very important vessel that was 90 percent blocked. Ironically, we both had heart scans done in July and her scan report said her coronary arteries were completely open. Apparently, sometime between last October and this past September, when she had to get an EKG for a preoperative evaluation to have her knee replaced, she had a heart attack. Her regular doctor missed this entirely, and fortunately, the anesthesiologist picked it up the day before surgery. Had she undergone general anesthesia for the knee should could have went into cardiac arrest and died on the operating table.

She's home now, went back to work just five days after the stent was put in place, and with luck she will be able to have the knee replaced in January.

Hope this is of some help Bill,

Gary

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Travlin' Easy