Angioplasty and Stents
Andreas Grüntzig widened a narrowed heart artery with a balloon catheter in Zurich in 1977; stents followed, and by about 1990 angioplasty outnumbered bypass operations.
Open in the interactive tree →Charles Dotter first opened a narrowed leg artery through a catheter in 1964. On 16 September 1977 Grüntzig performed the first balloon angioplasty of a coronary artery in an awake patient, using a catheter he had built himself; the first US procedures followed in March 1978. Bare-metal stents, introduced in the mid-1980s, stopped arteries from snapping shut again, and drug-eluting stents (first used in Buenos Aires in 1999) reduced re-narrowing. Catheter treatment now opens arteries during heart attacks, though the ISCHEMIA trial (2019) found no gain in survival for stable angina.
Prerequisites
- X-Rays1895Catheters are steered through arteries under live X-ray images.
- Plastics (Bakelite to Nylon)1907-1953Grüntzig's balloon catheter was made of tough plastic, polyvinyl chloride.
- Stainless & Alloy Steels1912-1913Stents are expandable mesh tubes of stainless steel.