At Saygın Clinic, we absolutely perform carotid vessel ultrasounds on all our patients. This routinely already exists in our inspection and review. We frequently encounter carotid artery occlusions and calcifications, even in our diabetic patients who come for a regular check-up for other reasons, and even in our patients who come with high blood pressure and have had leg vessel occlusion before may found to have a critical carotid (Brain) artery stenosis
Our primary goal here is to understand how much the stenosis is and whether the stenosis is wet or dry. In other words, the jugular vessels sometimes become dry in the calcified bony structure within the vessel wall and form a constriction in the middle of the vessel that goes to the brain like an hourglass, so this lesion leads patients to experience stroke& paralyses.
When we see this, we need to immediately process it and clean the area with emergency surgery because once the blood pressure rises, sometimes when sugar rises, then a piece the size of a pinhead breaks off and throws it into the brain with the bloodflow, our patient becomes paralyzed, unable to hold his arm and/or leg, and cannot speak maybe for years.
Our primary procedure for the treatment of jugular brain vessels is Robotic Vascular Departure. This procedure is performed while our patients are alert & awake, and without surgery, suturing, anesthesia, and pain. After local anesthesia in the groin region, we first put an umbrella fishnet on beyond the stenosis with brain imaging, cerebral vascular imaging and prevent clots from moving into the brain. Then, we place a specially made cerebral vascular stent in the area within the stenosis. During the application, our patients do not feel pain and can stay in the hospital for one day after the procedure.
Sometimes, our patients may have different carotid artery problems. It is very common for the jugular vessel -artery to become kinked, that is, to bent over in the middle like a hose, due to high blood pressure, or the calcification in the jugular brain vessel can affect a very long region. Then, rather than placing a stent, we do the operation for opening the vessels surgically while talking to our awake patient, without any pain and doing continuous neurological imaging, as well as measuring the cerebral blood flow, which we call transcranial doppler. In such vascular treatment procedures, we usually harvest a very short segment vein from patient’s leg, or with a special vascular patch we call as “dacron”, in the area of the brain vessel narrowed like an hourglass with that calcification. Our success rates in our carotid artery surgeries are quite high. Our patients usually stay in our hospital for 1 day after the surgery and can be discharged on the 2nd day. Procedure takes about 1 hour to complete.