You’re in good hands with our vascular surgeons
Your body holds nearly 100,000 miles of blood vessels. These vessels can be as thick as a garden hose or thinner than a hair, and they carry blood all over your body. There are three types of blood vessels:
- Arteries – These carry blood away from your heart to bring oxygen to your body.
- Veins – These carry blood back to your heart so that it can get more oxygen from the lungs.
- Capillaries – These smaller vessels connect veins and arteries, like neighborhood streets off of a main road.
All of these blood vessels play an important part in keeping blood flowing throughout your body. When there’s a problem with your blood vessels, you may need vascular surgery.
That’s where the doctors at Main Line Health, with locations throughout the Philadelphia suburbs, can help. Our doctors have extensive training in how to perform surgery to repair or rebuild your blood vessels when there’s a problem.
Learn more about minimally invasive vascular surgery
Given that blood vessels can be so small and delicate, vascular surgeons must be careful when operating on your arteries or veins. In fact, many vascular surgeries are actually minimally invasive procedures that don’t involve a traditional surgery at all.
Our doctors can do minimally invasive treatments using one small incision near one of your larger blood vessels, often in the upper thigh. Then they’ll use an imaging tool like ultrasound to guide a thin tube, called a catheter, through your network of blood vessels. Once they’re in place, they can insert tiny tools through the catheter to fix the problem.
Using this technique, our doctors can treat conditions like:
- Varicose veins
- Plaque build-up in your arteries
- Blood clots
Sometimes, especially with larger blood vessels like the aorta (which is your body’s main artery), a traditional open surgery is the only way to fix a problem. Our expert surgeons frequently perform vascular surgeries of this type, including emergency treatments for tears in the aorta (known as aortic dissection).
Working together with the rest of the Main Line Health team
If you have a problem with your heart or one of the blood vessels in it, we’ll work together with the cardiology department on your treatment. If you have a problem with one of the blood vessels in your brain, neurosurgery might be your best option. Our team will help you pick the right type of treatment for you.
