Female Speaker: Peripheral artery disease, also know as peripheral vascular disease affects 10 million Americans, mostly over the age of 50. In this segment, we introduce a new device to treat PVD called the Diamondback 360 degrees Orbital Atherectomy System.
Dr. Guy Mayeda: This is brand new. We've probably done about six patients so far with this device. We are using this device at targeted patients who have blockages in small arteries below the knee and heavily calcified arteries, or sometimes with arteries with so much of calcium, in the bigger of the arteries, we use it as a pretreatment before SilverHawk. We are getting a really good success, it's really designed to target for patients for with bad peripheral vascular disease like calcium in small arteries, almost complex patient population.
Female Speaker: The risk factors are similar to coronary heart disease. Although diabetes and smoking have been identified as particularly high risk factors for PVD. Generally, only 25% of people are diagnosed with PVD. Yet it was the cause of the 150,000 amputations last year.
Dr. Guy Mayeda: PVD or Peripheral Vascular Disease involves the disease or blockages of the arteries, anywhere in the circulation outside the heart. The Diamondback 360 System is a new device, it's a new device, now available in our armamentarium to treat Peripheral Vascular Disease in the Cath lab. It's under the category of what we call atherectomy device. And it's one of the devices that was designed to actually remove the plaque from the artery.
This Diamondback device is a round or elliptical shape device, so it's kind of offset, so it's kind of half in the ellipse, and on the outer edge of the device, it has small diamond particles bonded on to it, so it's almost like a strip of sand paper.
What the device does is when we place it into an artery, it's driven by air turbine, which sound almost like a dentist drill. It rotates, this end with the air turbine, between 80,000 RPM to 180,000 RPM. And as it's spinning, it sands basically the plaque from the artery, the small particles. It doesn't actually cut and remove it, distort and then remove it, it's actually sanding the plaque down, creating a larger lumen. And the plaque and the calcium deposits in the plaque, as it's been sanded down, are broken into small micro-particles, which are actually smaller than the red blood cells.
So, blood is flowing in the artery continually during the procedure opposed to an angioplasty, where the stent with the balloon blocks the blood flow and as the device is sanding gradually this plaque down to a thinner and thinner layer of plaque, these particles are washed by the blood stream, downstream and it's actually filtered out of the blood stream to different organs such as the kidney, liver and spleen and then excreted from the body, the body's kind of filtering system.
This device has been needed in, peripheral intervention procedures. Because many of our patients with severe peripheral vascular disease, especially patients, who have kidney failure and are on dialysis, or patients with long-standing diabetes have such extensive calcium deposits in the plaque that it doesn't allow us to remove that calcium hard plaque out of the artery with some of the traditional devices such as the SilverHawk device which we had talked about before or even using a balloon angioplasty or stent, sometimes the artery is almost calcified to the point that it's being as hard as bone and the balloon can't expand or compress that type of plaque.
This device because it's not designed to compress or expand the plaque or even cut it, is basically a sanding device to, to treat the lumen. And It can be used through the whole length of the artery for long segments of disease. So, this has been actually a new device that has been used, and I think it will be a valuable part of our toolbox, our armamentarium to treat these patients with peripheral vascular disease.
Female Speaker: For additional information on other forms of treatment for Peripheral Vascular Disease, go to Good Sam TV at www.goodsam.org and select the SilverHawk episode. For a referral to some of our physicians, call 1-800-GS-CARES.
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