Can You Put a Stent in a Bypass Graft?

Most of the patients continue to deal with the problem of blocked coronary artery even though they undergo the process of coronary artery bypass graft. Because of this, cardiologists recommend for putting a stent in the diseased bypass grafts in various symptomatic patients, who usually deal with coronary artery in their end-stages of the problem. Especially, doctors opt to use stent as a palliative therapy in patients, who remain at a huge risk related to conventional angioplasty or surgery-based re-interventions.

Yes, doctors can put a stent in a bypass graft. Cardiologists often prefer to perform stenting after coronary artery bypass graft or simply bypass surgery to allow reopening of the occluded bypass conduits or to help in the reopening of the blockages of coronary artery, which may have formed during the surgical procedure. Bypass surgery may not stop the development of the problem. In this situation, it becomes essential to notice the condition of your body minutely to go for another available alternative to the bypass surgery process.

A few cardiologists have even found that arteries regain their previous shapes or even collapse after the surgical process or deflation of the balloon. On the other side, in some of the cases, coronary arteries become narrow again. Hence, in order to resolve the problems, doctors recommend creating small stents to mount after CABG and put them within the blood vessels. These stents expand to lock in their places accurately to form permanent scaffold. In this way, placement of stents helps in avoiding artery blockage to a huge extent.

Stents are of small size and expandable tubes, which are helpful in the treatment of narrowed coronary arteries in the heart of patients. In this way, individuals dealing with the problem of coronary heart problems because of the plaque formation may get benefits from the placement of stents as follows-

• Opening of the narrowed coronary arteries
• Reduction in various symptoms, including the chest pain
• Proper treatment of heart attack and other related heart problems

Because of the ability of stents to avoid or reduce cardiac/heart problems, cardiologists usually, call such stents as heart stents, coronary stents or cardiac stents. These are usually comprised of metallic mesh, while doctors put them in the arteries during a procedure referred as percutaneous intervention of coronary or commonly known as angioplasty. Surgeons perform the process of angioplasty by using only mild sedation and a local anesthesia. In simple words, the process excludes any major incision and requires hardly one hour. However, if a patient requires two or more than two stents, in that case, duration of this process may be relatively long.

Let us have a look on two types of cardiac stents, which cardiologists usually place in their patients.

First generation stents consist of bare metals. Despite these are able to avoid the risk related to the collapsing of arteries, they reduce the risk related to re-narrowing of arteries in a modest way. In fact, approximately one-fourth of the total coronary arteries treated by the help of bare metallic stents may close again and even within a period of only 6 months.

Limitations present in the bare metallic stents force most of the companies and doctors to find stents available with coated drugs to interrupt in the re-narrowing process. Cardiologists refer such stents as drug-eluting stents. Clinical trials have proved that drug-eluting stents have successfully reduced the cases related to re-narrowing of coronary arteries to minimum 10 percent. Even they reduced the requirement related to repetition of procedures for diabetes patients and those, who have relatively higher chances related to re-narrowing of the arteries.