Interventional Cardiology: Responding with Skill when Every Minute Counts

When it comes to treating heart attacks, the Heart Center at Lankenau Hospital stands ready to respond swiftly, accurately, and efficiently. Time is key to reducing the damage to the heart and improving the quality of patients' lives.

Today, the optimal treatment for a heart attack is an emergency angioplasty, which uses a balloon catheter to open clogged arteries. With one of the busiest catheterization* and angioplasty programs in the region, Lankenau is a leader in taking angioplasty to the next level.

Drug-Coated Stents
A common complication of angioplasty has been restenosis, or re-narrowing of the arteries, which causes patients to have repeat angioplasties or bypass surgery. In the early-1990s, the introduction of stents, tiny, wire mesh tubes to prop open the arteries, dramatically reduced this occurrence, but did not eliminate it.

Lankenau interventional cardiologists were among the investigators whose clinical trials led to a major breakthrough, the use of drug-coated stents.

Pharmacologic Treatments
Heart Center researchers also have produced pioneering work in drug treatments during angioplasty to reduce the risk of infinitesimal blood clots forming in the vessels during the procedure.

As a result of its participation in worldwide studies of specialized blood-thinning agents, our physicians routinely administer blood-thinners to stent patients to limit the ability of blood clots to stick to the stent.

* Catheterization is a diagnostic procedure in which a catheter (a long, narrow tube) is inserted through a blood vessel into the heart allowing the doctor to discover how the heart and coronary arteries are working. Once results are determined, interventions may include angioplasty, stenting, or atherectomy.