The News Herald (Willoughby, OH)
A game-changer for Chester man
Jim Fraser believes in miracles.
And he considers being the first person in the Midwestern U.S. to receive a medical bioresorbable stent as one of them.
On July 4, the 73-yearold Chester Township man, who already had three metal stents implanted in an artery, was taking a walk when he experienced a strong pressure building in his chest. The next day his primary care physician suggested that he contact his cardiologist. Fraser says because he’s “a little Irish, a lot Scotch, and a lot stubborn” he waited for two days.
When tests revealed a staggeringly high blood pressure, paramedics were called and Fraser was immediately brought to University Hospitals in Cleveland.
Having previously been told that additional metal stents were not an option, he feared that open heart surgery was imminent.
“I just had this terrible picture in my head of splitting my chest open,” he said.
Doctors decided to proceed with a heart catheterization. Eventually three blockages in a single artery were detected.
Two and a half hours into the procedure doctors stopped and informed the patient they would complete it the following day.
“I thought ‘wait a minute, this doesn’t sound very cool’,” Fraser said. “But then they told me a new (absorbable) stent had been approved.”
The next day three Abbot Absorb stents were implanted and the three already in his body were cleaned out.
“As far as I’m concerned my whole situation was nothing less than a series of miracles,” Fraser said.
Along with the wonderful news of the absorbable stents came information concerning the recovery period. When the metal stents were implanted Fraser was given certain restrictions and told to take it easy for three weeks. With the new stents he was permitted to resume normal activity, including driving a car, within days.
“I about flipped,” he said when learning of the short amount of downtime.
Recently approved by the U.S. Federal Drug Administration, Absorb is the first and only fully dissolving stent approved for the treatment of coronary artery disease which impacts more than 15 million people in the U.S. It also is the world’s leading cause of death, according to University Hospitals.
Dr. Hiram Bezerra, medical director of the Cardiovascular Imaging Core Laboratory at UH Case Medical Center and also the doctor who implanted Fraser’s stents, and Dr. Gui Attizanni of the UH Harrington Heart and Vascular Institute in Cleveland, played major roles in assisting Abbott Vascular with making the new device available.
“Absorb is a new, potentially game-changing therapy for coronary artery disease,” Bezerra said. “While it may never totally replace traditional DES (drug-eluding stents), this novel technology gives us the ability to repair a patient’s artery with comparable healing and safety and reduced long-term complications.
“The device restores vasomotor function and pulsatility allowing the artery to move and more naturally regulate blood flow. It also avoids the long-term future complications related to metallic stents such as inability to graft a fully stented artery in the event that a patient needs coronary artery bypass grafting.”
The innovative stent opens a patient’s blocked artery but then disappears, leaving no metal behind to restrict natural vessel motion. It’s made of polyactic acid similar to material used in dissolving sutures. Through the process of hydrolysis, the scaffold is metabolized after two to three years, according to UH.
Although new to the United States, the device has been widely used in Europe for about five years.
Along with gratitude for the staff of nurses and doctors whom he claims displayed genuine concern for his welfare, Fraser is vastly appreciative of the new medical “miracle.”
“The stent is just the greatest invention for me that could every possibly be,” he said.
“If I didn’t have those stents I wasn’t optimistic I would have made it through. My experience is just overwhelming as a result of going to UH.”