Bill Clinton in 'good spirits' after heart surgery

Published on Thursday 11 February 2010 23:34

FORMER United States president Bill Clinton is recovering from surgery after being admitted to hospital with chest pains last night.

An operation to open blocked arteries in the 63-year-old's heart was carried out after an examination by his cardiologist.

The former premier has had two stents – wire mesh tubes that help the flow of blood – placed in one of his coronary arteries.

Mr Clinton's wife, Hillary, the current US Secretary of State, had left Washington and was heading to New York to be with her husband last night.

Their daughter, Chelsea, was already said to be by his bedside in the New York Presbyterian Hospital. An aide said he was in "good spirits" following the operation.

The operation came six years after Mr Clinton had quadruple heart bypass surgery to free up four blocked arteries – and only days after he had returned from helping with the relief effort in Haiti.

Last night experts said his chest pains were likely to have been caused by falling grafts from the earlier surgery. Stents are tiny mesh scaffolds used to prop open an artery after it is unclogged in an angioplasty procedure.

Doctors thread a tube through a blood vessel in the groin to a blocked artery, inflate a balloon to flatten the clog, and slide the stent into place.

He has undergone a different treatment from 2004, when clogged arteries first landed him in hospital. He underwent quadruple bypass surgery because of four blocked arteries, some of which had squeezed almost completely shut.

Mr Clinton has been heading up a huge US relief effort in Haiti in the wake of the earthquake on 12 January. Sources say he had been suffering from a cold and had been worn out from a trip to Haiti last week.

Douglas Band, a spokesman for the former president, said: "Bill Clinton was admitted to the Columbia Campus of New York Presbyterian Hospital after feeling discomfort in his chest.

"Following a visit to his cardiologist, he underwent a procedure to place two stents in one of his coronary arteries. He is in good spirits."

Mr Band said Mr Clinton would "continue to focus on the work of his foundation and Haiti's relief and long-term recovery efforts".

Dr Cam Patterson, a cardiologist at the University of North Carolina, said the produce was fairly straightforward and would have taken around an hour to perform. He said: "Bill Clinton had quadruple bypass surgery about six years ago. That surgery is intended to supply additional blood to the heart when the native heart arteries are blocked.

"The problem is that the grafts that are placed in a bypass procedure have an average life span of about ten years.

"Some of them will last for five years and some will last for 15 years. So if he had four grafts it is not surprising that one of them would start to fail by now."

Dr Clyde Yancy, cardiologist at Baylor University Medical Centre in Dallas and president of the American Heart Association, said it was "not unexpected" that Mr Clinton had needed more surgery.

He said: "This kind of disease is progressive. It's not a one-time event, so it really points out the need for constant surveillance"

Mr Clinton had a cancerous growth removed from his back shortly after leaving office in early 2001. In 1996, he had a pre-cancerous lesion removed from his nose and a year before that had a benign cyst taken off his chest.