Health Blog Primer: What’s a Stent?

Bill Clinton was admitted to the hospital for chest pain today and had two stents placed in one of the arteries around his heart.

Here’s what that means:

A stent is a wire mesh tube that’s used to prop open an artery. That’s a stent in the picture.

Stents are often used for patients with unstable angina — sudden chest pain that can be a prelude to a heart attack.

In a typical procedure, doctors start by making a small incision in the patient’s groin, then threading a catheter through the incision and into a clogged artery. Then they perform a procedure called angioplasty, using a tiny balloon to clear away plaque that’s clogging up the artery. Then the doctors run the stent through the catheter and into section of the artery that was just de-gunked.

The stent reduces the risk that the artery will re-close. Some stents are coated with a drug, to further reduce that risk.

There’s been a lot of discussion over the past few years about whether stents are overused, particularly for patients with chronic chest pain. For more on that subject see this front-page story from this morning’s WSJ.

Image via Bloomberg News