The new laser method of dealing with blood clots

An international team of scientists has developed a new method to identify the "fugitive" blood clots in the vessels. In the future, harmful clots and will also be destroyed.

With the results of a group of scientists, which includes American, German and Russian specialists can be found in the publication PLoS One. It is a technology that allows to effectively identify blood clots in the vessels. This issue is relevant for the millions of people across the world. Formed on the walls of veins and arteries, blood clots may "fall off" and start to travel through the circulatory system. Ultimately, this can lead to clogging of blood vessels and death of certain organs, which, of course, bears the risks to human life.

Methods for detection of "runaway" thrombi were offered before, but they all have relatively low sensitivity. Additionally, very difficult to eliminate the thrombus detected in real time. Now, however, scientists have revealed the world a much more efficient method, which is based on photoacoustic flow cytometry. The concept looks like this: the body cells are injected with special luminous substance, and then one or another part of the body is irradiated with a laser, forcing the dye molecules to glow at a specific wavelength.

The intensity of the glow tells scientists, whether in the vessels "runaway" clots. In case of detection can be used immediately and laser to destroy dangerous clots. However, the latter can be a real little later, after all the necessary studies have been completed. Note that the new method of detection of blood clots has already proved its efficiency during experiments on mice.

Using the new method during the operation is not possible. On the other hand, the technique can be applied soon in the postoperative period. Scientists themselves say that it will dramatically reduce the number of possible complications.


Previously, we recall, another group of researchers concluded that aspirin is very impressive in the fight against blood clots. Its application, as it turned out, a 42% reduced risk of new blood clots.