Stents - Living With a Stent - Living With a Stent

It is important to get routine medical care if you have a stent. Talk with your doctor about how often you should schedule office visits and blood tests.

• Discuss when you should follow up with specialists, such as a cardiologist or pulmonologist.
• Take medicines to prevent complications. If you have a stent in your artery, take all medicines regularly, as your doctor prescribes. Do not change the amount of your medicine or skip a dose unless your doctor tells you to. You will need to take antiplatelet medicines, or blood thinners, to prevent blood clots from forming in the stents in your arteries. Your doctor may prescribe these medicines for one year or more after getting a coronary stent, while it may be one month or more for carotid or peripheral artery stents. Antiplatelet medicines include aspirin, clopidogrel, dipyridamole, and ticlopidine. Bleeding is a possible side effect, which can make it much riskier to have surgery.
• Talk with your doctor about when you can resume normal physical activity. It will depend on the stent and your condition before the stent procedure.

Return to After Getting a Stent to review instructions from your healthcare team after your stenting procedure.

Stents serve as treatment but cannot cure an underlying condition. Some types of stents need to be checked by your doctor to make sure they have not moved and are functioning properly. This may include:

• Bronchoscopy to check an airway stent about four to six weeks after placement.
• Chest X-ray or CT scan to look for signs of any complications from an airway stent.
• CT angiograph (CTA) or ultrasound to make sure a stent graft placed to treat an aortic aneurysm is not leaking or has moved. You will likely need imaging about one month after your procedure. If a leak or other problem is detected, you may need imaging tests again after six months or one year to check it. If there is a bad leak, more surgery may be needed. Your stent graft will need to be monitored by imaging throughout your life.
• Referring you to a specialist if you have signs or symptoms related to your condition.
• Regular general exams to check overall physical and mental health.

Your doctor may recommend the following healthy lifestyle changes to reduce the chance of needing more procedures in the future or experiencing a heart attack or stroke.

• Aiming for a healthy weight
• Being physically active
• Heart-healthy eating
• Managing stress
• Quitting smoking. Visit Smoking and Your Heart and the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute’s Your Guide to a Healthy Heart. For free help quitting smoking, you may call the National Cancer Institute’s Smoking Quitline at 1-877-44U-QUIT (1-877-448-7848).

Watch for signs or symptoms of complications from a coronary stent, carotid stent, or stent graft, including:

• Blood clotting. A blood clot is an uncommon but serious complication that can occur within the stent. Your risk of getting a blood clot is much higher if you stop taking your blood thinners before your doctor says to do so. Blood clots can lead to life-threatening conditions, such as heart attack, stroke, and venous thromboembolism.
• Chest pain. This can be a symptom of restenosis, in which the artery where a stent is located closes up again. Restenosis is a common complication because of too much tissue growth within the portion of the artery where the stent is placed. It can lead to a heart attack if your stent is in a coronary artery. In this case, a symptom of restenosis may be chest pain. If it happens in other arteries, restenosis may or may not cause symptoms. If restenosis occurs, you will need another procedure, such as one that involves both angioplasty and possibly placing another drug-eluting stent.
• Stent or stent graft failure. Occasionally stents may break within a peripheral artery. Rarely, a stent graft used to repair an aortic aneurysm or dissection may move from where it was placed. Blood may also leak out of the graft. Symptoms may be similar to those you experienced before getting a stent, or you may have no symptoms. Your doctor will use imaging to monitor the stent graft.

If you have a stent because of ischemic heart disease or carotid artery disease, you are still at risk for complications related to those diseases, such as heart attack or stroke. If you think you are or someone else is having the following symptoms, call 9–1–1 immediately.

Heart attack signs and symptoms include:

• Mild or severe chest pain or discomfort in the center of the chest or upper abdomen that lasts for more than a few minutes or goes away and comes back. It can feel like pressure, squeezing, fullness, heartburn, or indigestion.
• Nausea, vomiting, light-headedness or fainting, or breaking out in a cold sweat. These symptoms of a heart attack are more common in women.
• Shortness of breath, which may occur with or before chest discomfort.
• Upper body discomfort in one or both arms, the back, neck, jaw, or upper part of the stomach.

If you think someone may be having a stroke, act F.A.S.T. and perform the following simple test.

• F—Face: Ask the person to smile. Does one side of the face droop?
• A—Arms: Ask the person to raise both arms. Does one arm drift downward?
• S—Speech: Ask the person to repeat a simple phrase. Is their speech slurred or strange?
• T—Time: If you observe any of these signs, call for help immediately. Early treatment is essential.

Read more about the signs and symptoms of a stroke.

Complications of an airway stent procedure may happen soon after the procedure or later. You should call your doctor right away if you experience any of the following signs or symptoms:

• Changes in your cough
• Coughing up blood
• High fever
• Persistent bad breath
• Problems breathing

These signs and symptoms may be caused by one of the following complications of your airway stenting procedure:

• Changes in stent placement, which can happen if the stent moves out of place. You may need another procedure to fix or remove the stent. This occurs more often with silicone stents. In rare cases, stents can become fractured or distorted.
• Lung infection
• Mucus caught in the stent
• Tissue growing into the stent, which can happen if the condition that caused a narrowed airway also causes it to become blocked again, such as in the case of a tumor growing through the stent. This occurs most often in the spaces in metal stents.