Dr. Lauren: What we see here and on the screen is the artery and it can be looked at either with color or without color if it is looked at with color you can see flow. In the analogy we use for our patients is its like a river and when a river gets narrow you get rapids, in the rapids the flow goes very fast and turbulent so a normal artery will look like a normal slow flowing river where as an abnormal artery would build-up a plaque, you will not only see the plaque which we can see in the wall but you also actually see on area of very high velocity and.
Travis Stork: So, you are looking at.
Dr. Lauren: At the red which will represent blood in an artery and then here is the vein which is right next to it which is not a problem and as she moves up here at this bifurcation were branches that's where we would anticipate seeing a problem and in her in addition to that we look at the thickness of the wall to determine whether or not she is building up plaque over a long period of time so that we can look at her today and to a certain degree predict whether years from now whether or not she will have serious plaque in her artery.
Travis Stork: How does she look?
Dr. Lauren: Stormy, I'm happy to tell you that your artery looks like it has a normal thickness to the wall and you don't have any events of plaque right now.
Travis Stork: And theoretically if you do this study on someone and they have an enormous amount of build-up there are procedures that you can perform to remove some of that plaque in addition obviously the life style changes you recommend. So there is an absolute reason to do this task.
Dr. Lauren: That's right and even though younger women don't have as higher risk all young women have parents, mothers, fathers like she have brothers and sisters so there are always people in the family who would benefit from this as we get older the risk is greater. So, at her age its just a great motivator for whether she is doing the right things in her life style and as she gets older it actually can be used to diagnose patients who have a very high risk of plaque and stroke and we actually have an example I think here.
Travis Stork: I want you to show what it look like if she would have plaque.
Dr. Lauren: Yeah, this would be an abnormal artery and you can see the normal flow of the river and this is the rapids that you get with the very high velocity and its because the artery is narrow than they are in the same amount of blood flow has to go through a narrower space so it has to go much more rapidly and we pick that up with the velocity and actually can very precisely determine the degree of narrowing and almost make a decision about treatment based solely on an ultrasound.
Travis Stork: Thank you so much Dr. Lauren.
Transcription by:
Scribe4you Transcription Services