Treatment of Carotid artery disease

The treatment for carotid artery disease depends on the severity of the disease. In some cases life style changes like exercise, a healthy diet, quitting smoking and loosing weight together with medication to control diabetes, high blood pressure and lower blood cholesterol levels can be enough to prevent a progression of the disease in the early stages. Your physician might also prescribe medications that can prevent platelets from aggregating in the plague or that inhibit blood clotting.

In more advanced stages, especially if you experience symptoms of restricted blood flow to the brain, the removal of the clog might be necessary. There are basically two options available to do this. The first method is a surgery called carotid endarterectomy. During this surgery, the surgeon will open the carotid artery and remove the clot. The surgeon might also remove any diseased parts of the artery. At the end of the surgery the artery will be sewn together providing better blood supply to the brain. Risks of this procedure depend on your age, your overall health and on other factors like whether you have transient ischemic attack symptoms or whether you had a prior stroke.

In some cases the risks of this surgery might outweigh possible benefits. For these cases a newer procedure is approved by the FDA. This procedure is called angioplasty and stenting. It is a procedure that is widely used for the narrowing of the blood vessels that supply the heart with oxygen. This condition is known as coronary artery disease. However, as a treatment of carotid artery disease, it is a fairly new procedure and it is not yet know how well it prevents strokes, which is the reason why, right now, it is only used for patients that are considered to have a too high risk to undergo the more invasive carotid endarterectomy or for patients that have enrolled in a clinical trial to evaluate the effectiveness of this procedure.

During angioplasty and stenting, a small incision is made in the groin area and a catheter is introduced into artery in the groin. The catheter is then threaded to the narrowed area in the carotid artery. The physician will inject a special dye to make the narrowing visible on an x-ray. A small balloon on the tip off the catheter will be inflated in the narrowing to flatten the plague against the artery walls. A stent, which is a small metal mesh tube, will be inserted into the artery to keep it open. It will be left in the artery permanently to provide support and keep the blood vessel open.