What is PCI or Percutaneous Coronary Intervention (Stenting)?

Hello, good morning Dr. Najjar. Good morning. I think you're going to explain to us about percutaneous intervention for coronary arteries. Yeah that's right, so percutaneous intervention or PCI as sometimes we call it or more colloquially known as stenting is a modern treatment of patients who have artery disease of the heart. So the heart has its own arteries and those arteries can get blocked up over time and that blockage is usually caused by a a combination of cholesterol, calcium, and some other substances that come together cause narrowing of those vessels. When those vessels narrow, it causes patients to have less blood supply, and that can cause tightness of the chest or breathlessness when you walk or exert your activity and do your normal work. You may be limited and less able to do things. And we may do a series of tests to work out whether chronic artery disease is the cause and there is a limitation of blood flow. And if that's the case, it may be suitable to perform something called PCI or stenting to treat that problem in the artery. And we know that PCI is a safe treatment. It can remove the stenosis and it can improve the blood supply of the heart and that may improve your symptoms. PCI is done typically through the hand or the leg and it requires us to place a tube inside one of the arteries. And it's a short tube. For example, I'll show you my hand. We may place an anaesthetic at the top part of your hand and then a tube that goes in through there. Once that tube is sighted, we then place other much thinner wires and tubes all the way up the arm and into the heart itself. Now, this is actually done while you're awake, but we may choose to give you a little bit of sedation to help you feel relaxed, and it means that you are calm and relaxed, not moving around, but you're not anesthetised as per se. That means you're not having a machine breathe for you. You're breathing and talking in your own way. you