Now walk away just after 2-hrs of Angioplasty; Fortis Escorts docs

Amritsar, August 25, 2012: Here’s some great relief for the cardiac patients and their families. Addressing a press conference in a hotel here today, Dr Arun K. Chopra and Dr Deepak Kapila, the pioneers of Interventional Cardiology at Fortis Escorts Hospital, Amritsar shared that with a new device introduced by a multinational organization in India , angioplasty patients could walk just two hours after the procedure.

 Last week Dr Chopra and Dr Kapila successfully used this device in 20 patients and made the patients walk just after two hours of the procedure. It was a moment of pride for them and for Fortis Escorts Hospital, Amritsar when a patient who had undergone angioplasty for the second time gave wonderful feedback. He shared that after his previous angioplasty he had to bear huge pain of manual compression and could not move from his bed till the next morning but this time with the use of closure device post procedure he could go to urinal without any help. He thanked both the doctors for bringing in the latest technology for patient comfort post procedure.

 This device is being used in US and other parts of the world for more than a decade. It’s a suture mediated closure device with which within 90 seconds after the procedure the puncture site can be easily closed. It just leaves a knot of monofilament polypropylene suture inside which is quite safe and regularly used by surgeons across the world.

In current practice, any cardiac patient who undergoes angioplasty (placing the stents in heart to open the occluded blood vessels and regain the normal blood flow) is given heparine to make the blood thin for the procedure to be easy and successful. Due to this one has to bear the pain of manual compression at the access site after the procedure. This compression is done by pressing hard at the puncture site to close the puncture done for the procedure. What’s embarrassing is a person holding tight at the groin continuously for 30 mins to 1hr just to close the puncture site.  It’s a painful procedure which is done either by physician or by the nurses or sometimes the family members at govt. hospitals. Sometimes this may lead to some other complications like hematoma (accumulation of blood). After the manual compression patient is kept under 2 hrs of head to toe movement restrictions followed by 6 hrs of movement restrictions. Now with the use of closure device the patients who don’t need to be monitored for long can be discharged early.

Every good thing comes with the cost and so is this device; but with the usage going up, the prices of this device are expected to be revised in future. With this latest suture mediated closure device being used in patients at Fortis Escorts Hospital, Amritsar, patient care is soaring to match global standards and practices.