WAMC Northeast Public Radio interviewed vascular surgeons Yaron Sternbach, MD, and William Raible, MD, of St. Peter’s Vascular Associates, for its story about a pioneering treatment for chronic limb-threatening ischemia, now being performed at St. Peter’s Hospital in Albany.
From the report:
Yaron Sternbach, a vascular surgeon, says maintaining a patient’s quality of life is most important when heading into the operating room.
The operation is a last resort for cases where bypass surgery, regular arterial stents or angioplasties don’t work.
He says during the roughly 1.5-hour, minimally invasive procedure that uses stents and devices to bypass blocked arteries in the leg and foot, blood is rerouted through veins, revascularizing tissue.
“Quality of life can’t be overstated. I think, you know, data focuses on lifespan, but we’re really, actually focused on health span more than that. And independent mobility, as I said, is one of the biggest factors,” Sternbach said. “When you look at that, it’s also a big factor in terms of the cost of care. It’s much more expensive to care for someone who is not independently mobile, they require much more help on an ongoing basis. So, for all those reasons, you know we need to do whatever we can in order to keep folks functional.”
Sternbach says people often wait for things to get better, especially in cases like this, but timing is of the essence.
“Once patients are too far along with their gangrene or ulcers, is not healing, if there’s extensive bony involvement with infection, even though we can restore blood flow, that leg from a soft tissue standpoint and a functional standpoint, may no longer be salvageable,” Sternbach said.
Since the hospital’s first successful LimFlow operation in August 2024, Sternbach and William Raible, a fellow vascular surgeon, have performed three of these operations.
Raible says the operation isn’t so different from work they already do, though.“It’s putting together a bunch of different techniques we’re already, you know, trained and skilled at, with some new tools to create a new outcome, again, routing blood from the artery to the vein using some of LibFlow technology that’s been developed over the years,” Raible said.
Click here to listen to WAMC’s story.
