I was wide awake. Tenn. He left Baptist Memorial Hospital the next day and was back at work five days later. The device, dubbed a Rotablator, won Food and Drug Administration approval in 1993. Manufactured by Heart Technology Inc. of Bellevue, Wash., Baptist physicians began using the device in January. Everyone believes most patients will continue to be treated with balloon angioplasty.
Heart disease remains the nation's leading killer.
In 1991, the most recent year for which federal statistics are available, an estimated 407,000 heart bypass surgeries and another 331,000 balloon angioplasties were done nationwide. Bypass surgery involves bypassing the narrowing with a blood vessel, often taken from the patient's leg, sewn onto arteries carrying the heart's blood supply. Balloon angioplasty involves threading a balloon-tipped catheter through a vein in the patient's groin to the heart narrowing. The balloon is then inflated, compressing the fatty deposits, thus increasing the heart's blood flow. In recent years, lasers and a shaving device have been added to the tools available for widening narrowed arteries.