Doctors prescribed blood-thinning drugs. But he still had symptoms. Patients, like Peter, face a one in ten chance of suffering a major stroke within a year. If you have a stroke and are crippled for life, that's a serious thing. So, Peter was one of the first to sign up for a new high-tech procedure at the Stanford University medical school.
Doctors are able to open arteries deep inside the brain without making any incisions in the skull.
Thin catheters are inserted into an artery in the patient's leg and then snaked up through the chest and neck, until they reach the brain's blood vessels. Then, a tiny balloon attached to the catheter is inflated and used to push open narrowed sections of the artery. And that's what it looks like dilating up and expanding the blood vessel. This angioplasty procedure is, technically, essentially the same as the very common procedure used to improve blood flow to the heart muscle. But in this case, the workplace is the brain, and that makes the issue much more delicate.