Health care experts at Detroit-based St. John Hospital and Medical Center were the first in the country to treat a high-risk patient using a heart pump and newly approved heart stent technology.
The procedure is known as the Tryton Side Branch Stent and was performed by Dr. Antonious Attallah, a St. John cardiologist.
The Tryton Side Branch Stent is designed to open arteries with a buildup of plaque at a site where one artery branches from another, known as bifurcation. Dr. Attalllah was the first in the U.S. to utilize this technology, along with an Impella heart pump during the procedure.
Coronary artery disease, the leading cause of death for both men and women, often results from the buildup of plaque where arteries branch together, and approximately 20-30 percent of patients undergoing a balloon angioplasty to open blocked arteries have the condition.
“Stenosis, or narrowing, located in a main coronary artery and an adjoining side-branch vessel is called a bifurcation blockage or bifurcation lesion,” says Dr. Attallah. “Bifurcation blockages are somewhat more challenging for cardiac interventionalists to treat than blockages that do not involve side-branch vessels, because current stents do not come in a “Y” configuration.”
The Tryton Side Branch Stent is engineered to provide complete lesion coverage and more predictable patient outcomes. It is deployed in the side branch artery using a standard single wire balloon-expandable stent delivery system, and a conventional drug eluting stent is then placed in the main vessel.
In February, the device became the first dedicated bifurcation stent to receive regulatory approval in the U.S. It is manufactured by Tryton Medical and distributed by Cordis.
SJH&MC is part of the St. John Providence Health Heart and Vascular Center of Excellence, a provider of heart and vascular care in Michigan.
