This device is not yet available in the United States. The drug-delivery device is a tiny balloon the size of a pin head. Attached to a special catheter, it is threaded through coronary arteries. At the treatment site, surgeons inflate the balloon so it embeds in the artery wall. The balloon has a double membrane designed to release its contents to the heart artery wall.
Doctors use heparin, a blood thinner, to treat cardiac patients at risk for blood clots.
But applied locally in this way and combined with stenting, it might have a positive effect. It might stop regrowth of the blockage in the vessel altogether, but we certainly need to follow a number of patients for a year before saying this definitively. The physicians' next trip to Poland could come as early as February 1996, and they plan to test other new interventional devices not yet available in the United States. All of the patients had end-stage heart disease and were referred regardless of their ability to pay for surgery. The operations were witnessed by 30 directors of cardiac catheterization laboratories throughout Poland and the Czech Republic.