Every year, some 600,000 people in the United States undergo coronary angioplasty, a minimally invasive procedure to open a narrowed heart artery.
The main reason to have an angiogram is to locate a narrowed heart artery that is causing chest pain or other symptoms.
The same is true if you face a high risk of having a heart attack for example, if you have chest pain (angina) from heart disease, or have had bypass surgery or angioplasty to treat a narrowed heart artery.
A large clinical trial has found that a minimally invasive procedure to replace a narrowed heart valve performed better than surgery in patients who were good candidates for surgery.
Opening a narrowed heart valve may seem like a simple idea, but the task itself becomes incredibly difficult when the patient is a 23-week fetus whose heart, a moving target, is the size of a grape.
But about 90 minutes to two hours before Mr. Bush spoke to reporters at the State Capitol here, doctors had begun a surgical procedure on Mr. Cheney in which they inserted a small device called a stent into a narrowed heart artery to keep the artery open.
Neurologists treated the blocked vessels in her brain and diagnosed her with a narrowed heart valve and high blood pressure.
Moreover, the diastolic and systolic diameters were significantly smaller in D-p38a −/−,D-p38b −/− than in wild-type hearts, resulting in a narrower heart tube.
Further indicating cardiac dysfunction, flies with PC-expressed catalase exhibited a narrowed heart tube phenotype at 1 week of age, as manifested by significant decreases in the diastolic and systolic diameters compared with control hearts.
It was 300 yards long -- just 100 vertical feet -- but it was narrow, heart-attack narrow, and jagged, dropping off to oblivion on either side.
