Atherosclerosis is the build-up of clots, dead tissues, cholesterol etc. in the artery and if it occurs in the coronary artery it causes heart attack, heart failure. As treatment, angioplasty, and bypass surgery or CABG is used. Angioplasty is opening clogged arteries with a stent, and CABG is grafting of a leg vein to a coronary artery. Both these surgical methods are not the treatment actually! In other words these are not the permanent solution to the problem.  Many a time’s people do have more problems after having surgery than before it.

Coronary Angioplasty

Coronary angioplasty, as described earlier, is not a permanent solution to the problem and usually the artery, which was gone under the process, becomes a clogged artery and that too in the same spot. This process is called restenosis.

The seriousness of the problem can be judged from the fact that in a study carried out on 510 patients, undergone coronary angioplasty, and 39% of them developed restenosis. This is a serious concern and the medical science understands and people are working to sort out a complete and permanent solution to the problem, though they are yet to be successful.

One thing must be mentioned here is that please do not hesitate in emergency angioplasty because when you are on the table having a heart attack it can do three important things:

Save your life
Restore blood flow immediately
Prevent further heart damage

Bypass Surgery:

In this process, a blood vessel from the leg is cut out and grafted into the artery in the heart to create a bypass and hence restore the blood flow. Although this process is more successful considering the restenosis than in stenting via angioplasty, it still has very similar poor results. Atherosclerosis remains where it was and like it affected the coronary artery before bypass, it will block the artery after the bypass because it affects the whole system. This makes the bypass blocked as well and so many timely surgeries are required.

This is not the end of the story and it is highly recommended to avoid the surgery to the last limit, which is when you’re life is in danger due to some serious illness, like myocardial infarction. It is found that almost 5 percent of the patients die during the surgery or within 2 weeks of it and some of them expire within 90 days of the procedure. Preventing or reversing atherosclerosis is the actual long-term and permanent solution and so you must learn how to prevent or reverse atherosclerosis.

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