Leading Doc: George W. Bush Fine Now, May Need Surgery in Future

Former President George W. Bush is out of the woods following the repair of a blocked artery, but he could face additional heart surgery down the road, according to leading urologist Dr. David Samadi.

"He's going to be under close surveillance. They're going to test him with a whole bunch of tests for his cardiac function and stress tests, make sure he'll be fine, and he'll move on," Samadi said Friday on "The Steve Malzberg Show" on Newsmax TV.

"The chances are that maybe in the future he'll need another one. but certainly, this was a big save."

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Bush returned home Wednesday and is doing well after the heart surgery at a Dallas hospital Tuesday morning.

Doctors placed the metal stent — a small mesh-like tube — in an artery of the 67-year-old former president after a blockage was discovered during a routine physical.

Samadi, chairman of urology and chief of robotic surgery at Lenox Hill Hospital, and professor of urology at Hofstra North Shore-LIJ School of Medicine, said Bush’s sudden health scare was unexpected.

"He's obviously very active. He likes to bike and he exercises all of the time. So it's a little bit of a surprise to see this kind of blockage," he said.

"The message is that, yes, you can exercise, but you want to make sure that your cholesterol, your blood pressure, all of that is in order."

Samadi recalled former President Bill Clinton being admitted to Columbia Presbyterian Hospital in New York City in the '90s with his own heart troubles.

"It was the same exact phenomenon, where he also got the cardiac stent," Samadi said.
"We are fortunate to be able to put these stents across vessels that have 80 [to] 90 percent blockage."

It wasn’t always that way, he noted.

"Patients used to go for what we call a bypass surgery. It was a major operation that required opening their chest — major surgery to bypass that lesion," Samadi told Steve Malzberg.

"Now we do stent, which is a metal tube that kind of opens up that obstruction, and we're able to save them and make sure that the heart is not damaged, the muscles are not damaged."