Word: angiogram
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...really think it probably saved my life," Bill Clinton told Larry King, speaking not about the bypass operation he had last week but about the test--an angiogram--that first showed that the arteries feeding blood to his heart were dangerously blocked. "If people have a family history there, and high cholesterol and high blood pressure," Clinton said, "they ought to consider the angiogram...
Good advice? Yes and no. An angiogram is the gold standard of heart tests, and in Clinton's case it picked up a problem that all his previous stress tests and electrocardiograms had missed. But an angiogram is not something to be taken lightly. It involves injecting a dye directly into the blood vessels of your heart through a catheter that has been threaded into your chest from an artery in your groin. By taking X-ray images of the dye, doctors can get a pretty clear picture of where blood is flowing freely and where there are constrictions...
...trouble usually begins when a fatty deposit or plaque, which has taken decades to build up on the inside of a coronary artery, becomes unstable and bursts, triggering a clot that blocks a blood vessel. Doctors can see these plaques during a fairly invasive procedure called an angiogram, in which a catheter is threaded through an artery in the groin or leg up to the arteries of the heart and a dye is then released to make any blockages easier to spot...
...watching a basketball game at home. I had this stinging pain in my arm and a cold sweat. I saw my doctor the next day. He said, "Angiogram immediately." He and the surgeon and the cardiologist all look at it and say, "It's a mess. You've got six months to live if you don't do anything, meaning surgery. Let's go." I said, "What are the odds?" He said, "Very good--about 8 or 9 to 1." I said, "O.K., I like the odds...
...face--once the color of a sidewalk, with a nasty eggplant underglow--began to turn almost rosy. It seems the body merely needed more time to follow instructions. Or perhaps new vessels had formed in the first month but were too minuscule to be detected by the angiogram. In midsummer, after six months, I returned to New York Presbyterian for more tests. They showed that formerly "hibernating" tissue on the front wall of the heart (not dead, but inactive) had reawakened. The ejection fraction (percentage of blood ejected with each heartbeat) had risen from 29 to 40 (normal is anywhere...