Shave it, then shake it: two tools together open stubborn heart blockages wider

When a heart artery is badly blocked, doctors thread in a tiny metal tube called a stent to hold it open. The hardest cases have lumps of hardened calcium poking into the artery, which stop the stent from opening fully — and a stent that cannot open properly is more likely to fail later. At Mount Sinai Hospital in New York, Dr Annapoorna Kini's team tried using two tools in sequence: first a tiny spinning burr to shave the lumps down, then a balloon that cracks deeper calcium with sound waves — a pairing they call 'shave and shake'. In the first randomised trial of its kind, with 66 patients who had these calcium lumps, the two-step approach opened stents about 19% wider than the sound-wave balloon alone, and every procedure succeeded. No patient in the study died or had a heart attack in the first 30 days. Larger trials are still needed to prove the wider opening means better health years later, but the result points to matching the tool to the blockage, not treating every blockage the same.

SDG 3 · Good health and well-being — Mechanism: tech innovation