Carondelet Vascular surgeon performs first-of-its-kind repair surgery | Health

The following is from a news release from Carondelet:

Tucson Vascular Specialists and Carondelet St. Mary’s Hospital have always been leaders in the community of advanced aortic aneurysm treatments. Now, the medical practice and the hospital are celebrating another first.

In early February, Dr. Scott Berman performed the first of its kind in Arizona’s, a minimally-invasive endovascular aneurysm repair (EVAR) on a patient with a juxtarenal aneurysm.  

A juxtarenal aneurysm is a ballooning of the abdominal aorta very close to the kidneys. Until recently, minimally invasive surgery was not an option for patients with abdominal aneurysms of this kind. Most repair work of this sort required open surgeries that led to much longer recovery times for these patients.

In early 2012, however, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved the Cook fenestrated and branched endovascular aneurysm repair system that expands the option of minimally invasive treatment to patients previously excluded from EVAR due to their anatomy. Because of Tucson Vascular Specialists’ extensive experience and consistent success with EVAR and Thoracic Endovascular Aneurysm Repair (TEVAR), Carondelet Heart & Vascular Institute at St. Mary’s Hospital became the first facility in Arizona to offer this innovative therapy.

“The impact of these technologies on patients with aneurysm disease has been far-reaching,” said Dr. Berman, in a recent news release. “There has been nothing more satisfying to me in my career than to see a patient walking in the halls, enjoying a regular diet and able to be discharged home on the first day after an EVAR or TEVAR procedure. This is in stark contrast to traditional open surgeries that require days in the intensive care unit, a week in the hospital and months to fully recover.”

According to Dr. Berman, about 70 percent of abdominal aneurysms he currently sees can be treated through minimally invasive procedures. The added ability to repair juxtarenal aneurysms in this same way increases the number of patients who can receive minimally invasive surgery of this kind by an additional 5 to 10 percent.

As an employed physician of Carondelet Specialist Group and a longtime physician leader at Carondelet St. Mary’s, Dr. Berman has been on the cutting edge of the remarkable improvements made in advanced aortic aneurysm treatments over the past decade. In 2000, he performed Southern Arizona’s first endovascular stent 2 graft for abdominal aortic aneurysm repair (EVAR). Six years later, Dr. Berman also placed the area’s first endovascular stent graft for the treatment of thoracic aneurysm (TEVAR) disease.