Instead of open and extensive surgery, the operation was performed in two punctures. For the first time, specialists at St. Luke’s Hospital of the First Medical Association of Lviv performed bifurcation stenting of the abdominal aorta.
They saved a patient with a huge aneurysm in the least traumatic way possible.
64-year-old Pavlo is from the city of Varash, Rivne region. Since his youth, the man has suffered from hypertensive crisis – a sudden increase in blood pressure. Already at the age of 20, his readings sometimes reached 220/180. With age, the disease bothered him more and more often and became chronic. To prevent the worst from happening, the man had to take his blood pressure every day, take medication, and visit a doctor frequently.
Six months ago, the usual symptoms were joined by constant shortness of breath and back pain. The doctors at the local hospital found Pavlo had a significant impairment of blood flow in the abdominal aorta and advised him to immediately consult doctors who deal with such pathologies.
Pavlo decided to be treated by Lviv specialists at the First Medical Association of Lviv because he had heard that they take on the most difficult patients and have extensive experience in treating blood flow disorders. And after further examination, doctors diagnosed the patient with an abdominal aortic aneurysm, that is, a localized expansion of the largest arterial vessel. In a healthy person, the diameter of the aorta is 3 cm, while the man’s was 12 cm. The aneurysm was about to rupture and lead to the patient’s death. It was necessary to operate immediately.
The vascular surgeons decided to operate on the patient endovascularly – through two mini-accesses in the femoral arteries. And in this way, they performed bifurcation prosthetics, that is, implantation of a “branched” stent system. This technique, which belongs to high-tech medical care, is used for complex vascular lesions in places of bifurcation of the bloodstream. However, since bifurcation prosthetics is too expensive for the medical system, it is not often used. This was the first time interventional surgeons at St. Luke’s Hospital performed such an operation, and everything went well.
Thanks to this least traumatic method of surgery, the man was discharged from the hospital on the third day after the operation.