2023-08-15 19:34:45
He was born in 1945 in La Plata. His father was a bus driver and his mother was a housewife. He attended high school at the National College “Rafael Hernández” and graduated from the Faculty of Medical Sciences, Universidad de la Plata, in 1971.
He completed his internship in the specialty of radiology at the Hospital General de Agudos San Martín, before moving to the United States where he completed his training in Diagnostic Radiology at the University of California Davis.
One of the major causes of sudden cardiac death is caused by the narrowing of the coronary arteries that supply the heart. This lesion is generated by lipid deposition.
Since the mid-1960s, the leading treatment has been invasive bypass surgery.
In 1977, Andreas Roland Grüntzig performed the first successful coronary angioplasty, however, the procedure showed a high rate of recurrence of arterial obstruction.
After attending a lecture by Grüntzig, Palmaz began working on the idea of adding to the practice of angioplasty a device that would remain in the arteries, avoiding the high rate of recurrence.
With that idea, he began to test different types of expandable rigid tubes, until he achieved a tubular network made up of a metal mesh. In 1983, Dr. Richard Reuter invited him to join the University of Texas Health Sciences Center, San Antonio, to continue his research.
Barely four years later, the first peripheral stent was implanted in humans at the University of Freiburg in Germany, repeating the experience in São Paulo, Brazil.
Due to its success, Palmaz patented the procedure on August 15, 1988, a patent that was recognized, in 2001, as one of the ten most important in the world.
The efficiency of the stent is very high and the risk of obstruction is very low. Its use made it possible to avoid numerous “open heart” surgeries.
In 2013, Julio Palmaz received the Special Mention for Lifetime Achievement from the Konex Science and Technology Awards, for having developed a medical procedure that is currently used throughout the world and that saved and continues to save millions of lives.
Screenplay by Javier Pasaragua and voiceover by Pita Fortín.
by Radio Profile
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