Mayo Clinic neurosurgeon Luis E. Savastano, M.D., Ph.D., discusses carotid artery disease diagnosis and treatment. He discusses the importance of targeting therapy and individualizing care plans for each patient and the value of a collaborative care team.
corroded artery stenosis is very common, especially in elderly patients. When patients are having symptoms for stroke and they're diagnosed with a stroke. It is critical to find the root cause of the problem because if you cannot target your treatment is unlikely that you're going to provide the best benefit to patients. And the benefit is preventing a future stroke. And Mayor, we have clinics which are multi disciplinary and basically they have specialist which involves neurology, stroke, neurology, cardiology, vascular surgery and neurosurgery where we work together to understand why a patient had a stroke, then we find the best option that we have for the patient and that is what we offer them for a very long time. The focus of our attention in corroded artery disease has been on the degree of narrowing what we have found and what we're doing our patients now is to look at the wall of the artery in addition to the degree of narrow and by looking at the wall of the artery. With basically next generation imaging tools, we can see the root cause of stroke in patients that otherwise are labeled with strokes of unknown reason and in those patients where we can find the problem. We can really help them by targeting our therapy both medically and with surgical interventions may we really pioneering basically a change in the DACA and we have basically the largest published a series of patients undergoing surgery for minimal to no stenosis and showing that we can really prevent recurrent strokes once the plaque becomes symptomatic where the patients having a stroke, if there is a significant narrowing, the treatment on top of the medical management includes basically repairing the artery. And overall there are three techniques that can be used and one is basically removing the plaque through surgery, which is called karate endarterectomy. The second option is to placing a stent through character, place in the groin or in the risk that is advancing towards the character. And the last option, which is the most recent is placing a stent directly from access into the carotid artery in the neck, which is called trans carotid artery revascularization. There are certain features within basically education that makes one option better than others. These are well established surgeries and interventions. And of course the more you do, the safer it is for the patients.
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