injection to look for troubles but now they found another application? that s right. a pet scan or a pet c.t. scan which is the imaging modality that s been used has been used in cancer and bone imaging. now we can actually pinpoint areas in heart arteries that are apt to rupture and cause heart attacks. jon: and it s not actually the artery that would rupture. it s the clump of plaque that gets attached to the side wall of ab artery. i think we have an animation of how it works or what it looks like. it s the plaque that ruptures and that can clog up the entire artery. that s right. understand this teening technique, we need to understand cholesterol. cholesterol deposits themselves in the heart artery. they form a plaque and then the plaque becomes enflamed with calcium.
and i think this is just sort of part of getting older. and obviously he does get his routine physical every year and they were table to catch this. and mark, thank you so much. we re going to go ahead now and bring in dr. habib smadi. he s a cardiologist here in atlanta. dr. sanjay gupta, cnn s chief medical correspondent is on the phone. dr. smadi, can you just explain what this procedure is to us, install,ing a stent. sure, brianna, so a stent procedure involves getting to the heart arteries through a hollow little catheter, similar to ivs that are placed in all emergency rooms. but we put these in the arteries instead of the veins, and navigate under x-ray guidance up to the heart and gauge the arteries of the heart and then on a little wire rail, we deploy these metal coils that we call
of the blood vessels through the wrist or the groin, and through that we snake some little catheters through the heart arteries, we inject dye and we identify the heart blockages and that s where the stent comes in. the accident is like a slotted metallic tube that goes in over a rail and is deployed at high ott moss feerk pressures on the machine. that pushes the black against the wall and restores the lumen and, hence, the blood flow to the heart. so the take away. president bush loves to mountain bike, was just out and about. what s the take away for people who think i m perfectly healthy. do i need to be running to the doctor? you ve got to watch for your health. it s known that if you have high cholesterol or diabetes or high blood pressure, either of these things probably the president had, you re certainly predisposed to heart disease. obviously if mom or dad or other
post surgical complication involving scar tissue and fluid buildup in his lungs. his cardiologist saying tonight one of the bypass grafts from the procedure six years ago was found today to be completely blocked. of course having stents placed in heart arteries is a routine procedure, sort of, for patients who suffer from heart disease. a stent basically creates a little scaffold that holds the blood vessel open, allowing blood to flow. nbc news chief science correspondent robbed bazell told us a million americans get stents each year. the inventor, charles dodder created his own trademark showing a crossed pipe and wrench. mr. dodder said the emblem meant, this relates to the stent, that if a plumber can do it to pipes, we can do it to blood vessels. joining us now is an associate professor of medicine at nyu
he s in good spirits, and we hope to have him go home tomorrow. in terms of the history here, our nation s 42nd president, mr. clinton, underwent quadruple bypass surgery at the same hospital from which the physician was speaking in 2004. mr. clinton required another operation six months after that bypass due to a somewhat rare post-surgical complication involving scar tissue and fluid buildup in his lungs. his cardiologist saying tonight one of the bypass grafts from the bypass procedure six years ago was found today to be completely blocked. of course having stents placed in heart arteries is a routine procedure, sort of, for patients who suffer from heart disease. a stent basically creates a little scaffold that holds the blood vessel open, allowing blood to flow. nbc news chief science and health correspondent robert bazell told us today that about a million americans get stents every year. one strange fact, the inventor of the coronary stent was