Two leading hospitals in the city – Apollo Hospitals and Nizam’s Institute of Medical Sciences (NIMS) – performed the implantation of “Absorb Bio-resorbable Vascular Scaffold (Absorb-BVS)”, a dissolvable stent, in coronary angioplasty on Thursday.
Teams of doctors at both the hospitals who performed the procedure described it as a milestone and the fourth revolution in interventional cardiology, particularly in Percutaneous Coronary Intervention (PCI) therapy, after the procedures of balloon angioplasty (1977), bare metal stents (1988) and coronary drug eluting stents (2001).
They said that Absorb-BVS was a revolutionary device, which was made of dissolvable material and was a natural substitute for the metallic stent, currently used to prop open the artery at the site of the blockage. Unlike a metallic stent, which remains in the body for a lifetime, the new device gets dissolved in due course – once the artery becomes normal.
Senior interventional cardiologist of Apollo Hospitals Dr. P.C. Rath said that the metallic stent, being a foreign body, would cause side effects sometimes. To overcome that patients have to be on lifetime medication, which in turn could cause gastro-intestinal bleeding and stroke. There would be no such side effects with the new device as it would get dissolved in the body after a year, he explained.
The new device is made of polylactide and costs about Rs. 2.75 lakh.
The head of Cardiology Department in NIMS, Dr. D. Seshagiri Rao, said the new device would open a blocked heart vessel and restore blood flow, besides providing support to the vessel until the artery could stay open on its own.
