This will be a quick post, which I think is only fair considering the Epic War and Peace style dissertation I put the readers through with my last post on How to Lose Weight.
This is just a sort-of follow up to my post about Penumbra. If you remember, at the end of that post, I posed a couple of questions about potential other uses for this technology.
One of those other uses I wondered about was whether or not this treatment could be used for occlusive arterial conditions other than strokes, such as heart attacks for instance.
Well, it seems I’m not the only one who considered this sort of idea. A study published in today’s New England Journal of Medicine titled Thrombus Aspiration during Primary Percutaneous Coronary Intervention shows very promising results from a study in the Netherlands looking into just just this sort of thing.
As promised, I will keep this post short by avoiding going into a lot of details about this study. Hit the link above if you wish to get into the nuts and bolts of it.
In a nutshell however, the Dutch researchers compared doing a conventional stent placement in a heart attack victim vs first using a device (that sounds very much like the Penumbra device) to vacuum the clot out of the blocked coronary artery prior to placement of a stent.
They found that using the vacuum technique resulted in better perfusion and outcomes compared to conventional stent placement alone.
