Chief of cardiac surgery Jennifer Lawton discusses the technical challenges and surgical techniques to address calcified vessels in coronary artery bypass graft surgery.
mhm. Thank you. Hi. My name is Jennifer Latin, and I'm the chief of cardiac surgery at Johns Hopkins. I'd like to talk to you today about some topics that were presented at our largest cardiothoracic surgery meeting the STS. The Society of Thoracic Surgeons that was just held virtually the first topic I spoke about was surgical strategies for dealing with calcified vessels in patients who have coronary artery bypass grafting. Despite the fact that strategies called endarterectomy were originally described in the early 19 fifties, thes surgical strategies have not evolved very much over time. We know that patients that air coming for coronary artery bypass grafting surgery tend to have more significant disease than they did in years past. And they tend to have more stents placed prior to coming to surgery. So when we actually do the operation and we have to so new blood vessels in order to provide new blood flow around blockages, it becomes more technically challenging. And I spoke about strategies in order to sow new blood vessels to these calcified vessels, which included trying to find a soft place toe open the vessel that did not obtain that did not contain calcium or trying to remove a portion of the calcified wall. Or the most complicated, which is called endarterectomy, where we remove essentially a calcified cast from inside the blood vessel itself, which is very technically challenging and also very high risk. So we're looking at new techniques in order to address these calcified vessels that are very difficult to deal with here. A Johns Hopkins. Thank you so much mhm.
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