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Better Balloons For Better Circulation

When you hear about hardening of the arteries, sometimes the heart comes to mind.  But it can happen in other places too, which a man from Danville found out a ...

When you hear about hardening of the arteries, sometimes the heart comes to mind.  But it can happen in other places too, which a man from Danville found out a few months ago.

This is 66-year-old Robert Ernest of Danville.  Does anything look different about one of his legs to you?  Nobody else can tell either.

"It started out, my foot was all red, I started getting sores on my foot," Ernest remembered.  He met us at Geisinger Medical Center near Danville during a routine check-up for a procedure he says saved his right foot.

Ernest had poor circulation.  Plaque buildup eventually lead to the hardening of the arteries in his thigh, something he says came on very quickly.

"One day it wasn't there.  The next day it was," he said.

Dr. James Elmore, who operated on Ernest, showed us an example of what a leg scan looked like.

"The blood vessel comes down and blocks completely right here. It's supposed to come down the rest of the leg," said Dr. Elmore, the Director of Endovascular Services at Geisinger Medical Center.  He explained that his team went into Ernest's artery through a small groin puncture using a drug-coated balloon like this one.  The balloon isn't new.  What is new is the medicated coating around it.

"That's what's exciting about this.  It's the first time we can ever deliver medication to the inside of a blood vessel in a leg, to prevent the blocking from coming back," Dr. Elmore told us.

Watch the tip as Dr. Elmore inflates the balloon.  This is what opened Ernest's artery and allowed blood to start properly flowing again.  He admitted this a procedure they'll likely be using often, as lots of people in this area have hardening of the arteries.

"The two most common causes are smoking and diabetes. In his case, he's had diabetes long-term," Dr. Elmore said, referring to Robert Ernest's case.

Ernest says the procedure was done only five weeks ago.  He called it quick and nearly painless, and now says nurses can feel a pulse in his right foot, something they couldn't do before.

"The circulation is great, the sores are gone, and he actually saved my foot."

An alternative to the drug-coated balloon you just saw is a stent inserted into the artery.  Stents are still used, and Dr. Elmore says which option is better for which patient is decided on a case-by-case-basis.

 

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