Cold heals

A group of cardiac surgeons from the El-Kamino clinic in California has developed a new way to combat atherosclerosis. Typically, to eliminate sclerotic plaques in the coronary artery, a procedure called angioplasty is used: through the femoral artery, a catheter is summed up to the “cork” place to the patient’s body and a physiological solution is served under pressure - this is how the lumen of the vessel is restored. However, the problem is that the microtrauma inevitable during angioplasty of the walls lead to the accelerated formation of new plaques. The essence of the new invention is that instead of a physiological solution, nitrogen oxide is supplied through a catheter, chilled up to -10%. The new method, called cryoplasty, gives only about 20 percent of relapses, and so far not in any of the patients to whom it was applied has come to the shunting.