Empowered Patient Podcast Providing Larger Stent Sizes to Interventional Cardiologists Means More Personalized Heart Health Therapies with Alex Nepogodiev Abbott Vascular
Alex Nepogodiev is a Divisional Vice President of Abbott Vascular Business and shares insights about the need for stents with larger diameters. In the past, physicians would have to take a smaller diameter stent and follow up with another catheter to expand that stent to a larger size and to match the vessel. This procedure added an additional step and risk.
Alex explains, "Some of the bigger challenges today are, of course, the variation in anatomy and the complexity of some of those narrowings that we have in our heart. Cardiovascular disease, obviously, impacts a lot of patients, and myself included, and it's important for us not only to maintain good health but also go for appropriate and timely checkups. And when the cardiologist finds a narrowing in our heart, they initiate the procedure by first doing an x-ray or an angiogram before proceeding to insert a stent. And once they do that, they can also use other imaging modalities to look more closely at the vessel."
"So XIENCE Skypoint large vessel sizes have been introduced now with the largest size matrix and the new diameters that come in vessel sizes of 4.5 or 5.0 millimeters in diameter. And what they allow us to do is treat patients who may have larger vessels. We're all unique, and some of us are patients who are larger male or we have vessels that are closer to the aorta. So those tend to be larger in diameter as well. And having these larger vessel sizes allows the physicians to, again, optimize and personalize treatments to those particular situations in those patients."
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