Chapters Transcript Video A Stent—And No Stroke—For This Patient Cornelius Albert is happily back behind the wheel of his car after a scary episode where he lost control of his arms and legs while driving, I managed to swear to the curb because I couldn't control my feet on my hands. I was just kind of real limber dangling like I swerved to the curb and stopped, waited a couple of minutes. The episode passed periodic episodes of dizziness, sent Albert from doctor to doctor until a cedar Sinai cardiologist saw an episode in real time. I wanted to speak and I was crying and I didn't feel that I was crying but I was crying and I couldn't speak and it lasted maybe two minutes, three minutes, but it was more intense than before. And the cardiologist says, well, you should see a neurologist. That's when neurosurgeon Michael Alexander was brought in, tests showed a blocked artery in the brain. Here, this is the left vertebral artery and you can see it looks pretty normal here and then it starts to get narrow here and here and then it's normal after that. So here is the blockage due to the cholesterol plaque in the artery. Albert was diagnosed with a intracranial atherosclerosis disease, severe blockages of the brain arteries which can lead to strokes. Mr Albert, his MRI showed he had a small stroke in the area of the blocked artery. The chance of a patient having another stroke within the next year with this type of presentation is about 20%. So about a one in five chance he would have had a more severe and disabling stroke within a year. I've been told since then, had this happened two or three years prior, I'd probably be permanently damaged. I would have had a massive throat and possibly died because my brain would have exploded. Dr Alexander was able to widen the artery using a stent similar to what they do for clogged heart arteries. So we went up through the artery from the inside inflated a balloon to open up that artery that's called angioplasty and then placed a stent to keep the artery open to give more blood flow to that area of the brain. So this is the same artery after the stent placement. So this is the area where the stent is from here to here and you can see these areas that were narrow before are more open. Months later, Albert is living a full life, working exercising daily and trying to eat healthy. I felt great, felt no residual effects of these episodes whatsoever. My head was clear. I no longer had these limp feelings of my limbs. This surgery saved my life and returned me to a normalcy that I can live with. And without this surgery, I think I probably would be dead. Created by
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