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 Disease Profile
Coronary heart disease occurs when the inside walls of the main arteries to the heart have become narrowed by a build-up of fatty material called atheroma. As this 'furring-up' progresses patients may experience symptoms such as chest pain 'angina' or breathlessness. Sometimes the sympoms are less specific such as increasing tiredness.
Investigations
Your doctor may recommend a 'stress'or excercise test to determine the cause of any chest pain. If the excercise test suggest the symptoms are coming from the heart then your hospital cardiologist may arrage a coronary angiogram that looks specicaly for heart artery narrowing
Angioplasty and Surgery
If the coronary angiogram shows the heart arteries to be narrowed your cardiologist may recommend stretching up the narrowings under local anaesthetic with a balloon catheter. This is frequently accompanied by 'stent insertion' to help support the newly opened arteries.
In typically more advanced situations you will be referred to a surgeon for coronary artery bypass surgery to provide a new blood supply to the areas of the heart affected by the narrowed arteries
Details of angioplasty and surgery »
These procedures are described in detail on the British Heart Foundation website. Try this link...
Personal Surgical Results
Coronary artery bypass surgery is now an extremely common operation, some 25,000 such operations are carried out in the UK each year. The average operative survival from coronary artery surgery is very high with a national average figure of 97.8%. Each surgical unit and cardiac surgeon now publish their results so that they are available to patients. The general 'index' operation for assessing cardiac surgical outcomes is currently 'isolated coronary artery surgery', this is coronary surgery with no other additional procedures, such as valve replacement, performed. These results are recorded nationally by the Society of Cardiothoracic Surgeons of Great Britain and Ireland and submitted to the Central Cardiac Audit Database (CCAD). The Guardian recently published a summary of these national results. My own results are appended for comparison
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