Are stents good or bad for heart patients? Hear what cardiologists have to say

As a physician, we often hear questions like these from our patients. For patients with heart disease, stenting is one of the ways they can be treated. Is this a good or bad way to do it? Let's find out

A cardiac stent, also known as a coronary stent, is one of the most commonly used devices in cardiac interventions and a common treatment for coronary heart disease. It is used to dilate narrowed blood vessels through a form of physical attraction. When our care arteries become narrow, it affects the degree of blood supply to the heart. Especially when our activity level is increasing, the demand for myocardial oxygen is greater than the coronary arteries supply, which can cause heart pain, angina, etc., resulting in myocardial infarction. And only when our vessels are narrowed to greater than 70% is it appropriate to install a cardiac stent.

In general, when this happens, we install a cardiac stent, which is a contrast dye that is given to the heart so that we can identify the location of the blockage in the heart arteries by observation. After this location is identified, we can puncture the arteries in the wrist, and then introduce the inflatable balloon catheter with the stent into the body and send it to the location of the heart arteries. The balloon is then inflated to open the stent and provide support to the blood vessel.

At this point, the balloon catheter is deflated and withdrawn to stabilize the stent inside the blood vessel. This is the only way to control the disease and save the patient's life.

In general, our doctors will recommend cardiac stenting only if our heart is more than 70% blocked. Since the patient is recommended to have a stent surgery, it must be a relatively good one among all the treatment options. After all, in line with the patient's own conditions, our medical equipment must seek the best strut, we doctors will give the patient the most suitable advice. This is also known as the benefit to risk ratio.

1. Psychological effects

For many heart patients, they are not willing to implant a stent. This is because for them, a stent is a foreign object and to have a foreign object placed inside the heart is unacceptable to them.

But when the stent is implanted into the body, most of the stents are metal stents, which are sterile and not harmful to the body , but will grow with the inner wall of our blood vessels, and the patient basically does not feel it. So, in combination with the patient's own medical condition, the use of stents is not lost as a method of emergency treatment.

2, life-long medication

Some patients think that once the stent is implanted in the body, it is necessary to take life-long medication can not leave. But in fact, if you are a patient with coronary artery disease, you need to take medication regardless of whether or not you have a stent. And the medications that we take, the antiplatelet drugs, protect the nail to a certain extent, preventing the nail from becoming restenotic, and on the other hand, preventing the onset or progression of stenosis in other blood vessels. And in fact, we are the ones who have to take tegretol or clopidogrel for an extra year after the stenting procedure, and on the contrary it is the patients who don't have stenting who have to take the medication for life.

3. Surgical risk

Other patients think that implanting a stent in the body is risky. But it's true that it's a surgical procedure, so how can it not be risky? Everything has some risk, but with the improvement of medical standards and technological updates, the level of stenting in China is getting higher and higher, and the risk is only a few percent.

And now the state is strongly advocating for a reduction in the cost of our stents, so that more patients can get timely treatment and afford medications to save their lives.

4. Quality of life

As a doctor in the clinical trial diagnosis and subsequent follow-up, we can find that the patients who have had a cardiac stent, for them, both to save their lives, improve the symptoms of myocardial ischemia as well as damage to the myocardium, but also eliminated their pain, improved their cardiac function, and improved their quality of life. their quality of life.

We all know that patients with coronary artery disease can't sleep at night, are worried about their health, can't do sports, can't play soccer, can't even get excited, can't have any interest in life, and their quality of life is deteriorating. After getting a heart stent, they don't feel anything different physically, and they have confidence in their future.

We doctors and patients know that any surgery has risks. Cardiac stenting is done to unblock a blockage in a part of the body or inside a blood vessel, but having a stent does not mean that the vessel or part will not become blocked again. So after the stent surgery, we must keep these points in mind:

1. Take your medicines on time after the surgical stenting is over.

After all, cardiac stent surgery only helps some of the blood vessels to re-circulate blood and re-establish the channels for blood transportation. Therefore, it is also important to use anticoagulant medications in conjunction with the end of the stent procedure for at least a year, so as to minimize the risk of a recurrence of heart disease.

2, pay attention to life and diet.

We often see a lot of patients, after the heart stent surgery recurrence of disease, the reason is because of the problem of lifestyle habits. If you often stay up late, overeat, don't exercise, smoke and drink, and are emotionally irritable, there is a high risk of relapse.

So, according to the patient's blood vessel blockage to develop the patient's treatment program, for the patients themselves are more good than harm, after all, our doctor's duty is to save lives.

And the stent itself is not harmful to our body, but will be fused with the walls of our blood vessels, but also to reduce the pain caused by the disease. As long as we can pay attention to the combination of daily diet and medication, such a procedure is generally not a problem and is the most suitable for the patient.