Bike Ride Commemorates 10 Year Heart Attack Anniversary and Occluded Artery

Jerusalem, Israel (PRWEB) July 29, 2011

In 2001, Mike Stone suffered an MI (heart attack) as a result of a clot that could not navigate a 90% blockage in the critical LAD artery, also knicknamed the 'widow maker' artery. Angioplasty and PCI (stent implantation) were performed. The statin medications he was prescribed totally disrupted his professional and personal life. At the beginning of 2007, an angiogram showed that the artery at the proximity of the stent had suffered 100% restenosis, also known as chonic total occlusion.

The nightmare of cardiologists performing PCI (stent implantation) is full restenosis, which is the re-blockage of the previously opened artery. Restenosis can and does result in sudden death. Restenosis occurring in stent proximity is not unusual. The American College of Cardiology convention held in New Orleans in March 2007 was conveyed to discuss this very common problem.

In the case of Mr. Stone, a bypass operation to circumvent the 100% blocked artery was not necessary. Mr. Stone, with his blocked stent proximity artery and without statins, still leads a very full and active life. Life style changes made by 61 year old Mr. Stone made a bike ride of this type in the middle of summer possible, despite the occluded artery

These life style changes have resulted not only in stabilizing his previous high blood pressure, but also the development and maintenance of newly developed arterioles that essentially function as a natural internal bypass operation to the blocked main artery. Mr. Stone documented and substantiated these changes in his book ‘Chronic Total Occlusion: After the Heart Attack, the Statins and Restenosis'' which was released in Spring, 2010.

Further information may be found at http://www.heartrecovery.net , or search for “Chronic Total Occlusion”’ on facebook.

Canadohta Lake man survives blockage in 'widow maker' artery ...

Emily White, a paramedic with Corry Ambulance Service, walked into Clyde Cooper's room at Hamot Medical Center on Thursday and gave him a big hug.

It was an embrace long enough to make Cooper crack a joke afterward.

"Emily's the only other woman my wife will let me hug," Cooper said with a wide smile.

White met Cooper two days earlier, in the back of a Bloomfield Township Volunteer Fire Department ambulance. Cooper, 65, who lives near Canadohta Lake, was suffering a heart attack, and White was working to save his life.

No one knew it at the time, but one of Cooper's main coronary arteries, the left anterior descending, was completely blocked. The artery is called "the widow maker."

"That's because so many people, about 600,000 a year, die before they can get the blockage opened," said Robert Ferraro, M.D., the Hamot cardiologist who treated Cooper.

But Tuesday was Cooper's lucky day.

He had not gone into cardiac arrest; he had a paramedic who knew how to keep him alive; and he was headed to a hospital that had just instituted a quicker way to treat people having heart attacks.

Instead of determining in the emergency room whether the patient is having a heart attack, paramedics like White send vital information as the ambulance races to the hospital.

"They send us an electrocardiogram, which tells us if the patient is having a heart attack," said Theresa Kisiel, Hamot's executive director of cardiovascular nursing and quality. "It's one thing that saves us valuable minutes once the patient arrives."

Instead of spending 10 to 15 minutes being evaluated in the emergency room, Cooper was wheeled almost immediately to one of Hamot's heart-catheterization labs.

It's a hospital policy that started Dec. 1.

Doctors, nurses and technicians in the cath. lab did the blood work and other tests required before Ferraro threaded a catheter into Cooper's coronary artery and opened the blockage -- 22 minutes after Cooper was brought through the ER's front doors.

That's about one-third the time it took the average Hamot patient in 2008.

"Every minute is important because when a coronary artery is closed, heart muscle is dying," Ferraro said. "The less time blood flow is restricted to the heart, the better chance you have of the patient making a full recovery."

Ferraro ended up placing a stent, a tiny wire mesh device, inside Cooper's blocked artery to keep it open. The doctor also opened another, smaller coronary artery that was blocked.

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