Welcome to Dr. Warrick's podcast channel. Warrick is a practicing cardiologist and author with a passion for improving care by helping patients understand their heart health through education. Warrick believes educated patients get the best health care. Discover and understand the latest approaches and technology in heart care and how this might apply to you or someone you love. Hi, my name's Dr Warrick Bishop and I'd like to welcome you to my consulting room. Today I'd like to deal with a question that came through on the Facebook page and one of the members of the group asked about calcification, claudication, bypass, plasties and calcified aortas. Whoa, well that's an absolute heap. So rather than sit down and type a response, I thought I would reply with a simple podcast and try and cover some of those bits and pieces. Well first of all, calcification. Calcification is part of the process of plaque or atheroma or cholesterol forming in the arteries. It's when calcium ends up really binding in part of the plaque. Part of that buildup of cholesterol in the artery where there's been some sort of micro scaffold that allows calcification to sit and rest and collect. And we can use calcification as a really sensitive marker of where atherosclerosis or plaque or cholesterol buildup is within arteries. We use a lot for the heart in particular, but other arteries also calcify if there is any. plaque or atheroma in them so calcification a really nice marker to show us if there is something going on in the artery wall claudication well claudication is a word that we use to describe a symptom and the symptom is that of burning or cramping the legs from exertion generally walking could be walking upstairs could be running but claudication is the term we give to a symptom of pain or cramp in the legs which comes from exercise. Now that pain or cramp in the legs which comes from exercise is invariably from narrowed arteries meaning not enough blood's getting to those legs causing pain causing cramp and interestingly the pain of claudication from lack of blood flow in the legs through exertion is really the same sort of pain as the pain of angina from lack of blood flow to the heart because of narrowed arteries in the heart so claudication is a bit like angina of your legs the other question was what's a bypass well if there's a area of irregularity in an artery a bypass is simply using a another conduit generally a conduit means another vessel, to go from a healthy part to bypassing the unhealthy part to another healthy part. So a really simple example of a bypass is if you had a bad artery in your leg and there was a complex area which needed, which wasn't letting enough blood flow through, you could take another vessel, you could plug it above, the blockage and then you go beyond the blockage and plug it past the blockage and therefore bypass that area of problem and that's a bypass. It just means you're going past the problem using another vessel. Sometimes these vessels can even be Dacron if they're in the legs so they can be man-made but often in the heart we use vessels that are either veins from the legs or arteries from the arm, or sometimes even the artery from the inside of the wall of the chest. So that's what a bypass is, literally using another tube to go past the problem. Aplasty, which was another question in the same lengthy question from the Facebook group, aplasty is where we open that... damaged area or the diseased area or the narrowed area of artery. We open it up. Often we use a balloon and that used to be that we used balloons in isolations to give us an angioplasty but these days we wrap a stent around those balloons so that when the balloon is inflated the stent is deployed, opens up that artery and that stent acts as a scaffold to keep the artery open in the disease. in that diseased area so bypass we plug a tube past the problem area angioplasty we put something within the problem area and open it up we balloon it up and then use a stent to keep it open the last question was calcified aorta well calcified aorta simply is a reflection of plaque or atheroma within the aorta and it represents what's going on In terms of the health of that aorta, the more calcification in the aorta, the more plaque or cholesterol has gone into that aortic wall and quite possibly the greater the chance of there being some disease and change in shape or even enlargement of that aorta because it starts to lose some of its usual fibrous, sorry, some of its usual elastic tissue. So I've covered calcification, claudication, bypass, plasty and calcified aorta. I hope that answers your questions. Keep the questions coming. Thank you for joining me. And as always, I wish you good health and goodbye.