History
The endarterectomy procedure was developed and first done by the Portuguese surgeon Joao Cid dos Santos in 1946, when he operated an occluded superficial femoral artery, at the University of Lisbon. Later, surgical intervention to relieve atherosclerotic obstruction of the carotid arteries was successfully performed by Dr. Michael DeBakey in 1953 for the first time, at the Methodist Hospital in Houston, TX. The first case to be recorded in the medical literature was in The Lancet in 1954. and the surgeon was Felix Eastcott, a consultant surgeon and deputy director of the surgical unit at St Mary's Hospital, London UK. A reprint of his article together with a modern commentary can be found on-line . Eastcott's procedure was not strictly an endarterectomy as we now understand it; he excised the diseased part of the artery and then resutured the healthy ends together. Since then, evidence for its effectiveness in different patient groups has accumulated. In 2003 nearly 140,000 carotid endarterectomies were performed in the USA (Halm).
Read more about this topic: Carotid Endarterectomy
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