Word: emboli
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...Francisco's Pacific Presbyterian Medical Center. The strokes may have been caused by blood clots that formed somewhere in or near the artificial heart and then traveled to the brain. According to Cardiologist Fredarick Gobel of the Minneapolis Heart Institute, the risk of such traveling clots, or emboli, is great "whenever you have foreign + materials in the vascular system." To reduce this risk for Haydon, doctors gave him anticoagulants before and after surgery, though this increases the risk of bleeding...
...necessary opening between them and stapling them together, in a 5-minute procedure that usually requires 20 minutes or more of scalpel work and stitching. One experimenter with the staplers, Dr. Mark Ravitch of the University of Chicago School of Medicine, has worked out a new way to prevent emboli (traveling blood clots) from passing into the lungs through the vena cava, the body's largest vein. He simply has the staples turned at right angles to form a filter which can be implanted in the vein swiftly and easily. Used in this manner, the new machines have already...
...bubble of air. An embolus can travel through an artery until it is caught at a narrow point, then shut off circulation to the tissues beyond. But last week two Georgetown University neurosurgeons reported that they had gone to a lot of trouble to make ultramodern emboli in the form of plastic pellets, and had used them to correct a brain defect...
...fact, they used four emboli, the surgeons reported in the A.M.A. Journal: tiny spheres of plastic (methyl methacrylate), with metal fragments inside to show up on X rays, and ranging from 2.5 mm. to 4.2 mm. in diameter. They opened the left side of the anesthetized patient's neck to expose the main branching of the carotid artery, principal supplier of blood to the brain. At 15-minute intervals they inserted successively larger plastic emboli. All came to rest at the base of the malformation, reducing its blood supply. The last and biggest pellet lodged for a while...
...fatal of all heart ailments are those due to bloodclotting, e.g., coronary thrombosis. For reasons not yet perfectly understood (too little exercise, poor metabolism, infection), blood cells sometimes begin to stick together to form a thrombus (a stationary clot). But the thrombus grows, may eventually let loose daughter clots (emboli) which swim on to lodge at vital bottlenecks in the blood stream. A thrombus which lodges in a coronary (heart) artery, blocking off the blood supply to the heart muscle, can kill within a few minutes; a clot in the brain causes a stroke...