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Patients with advanced or recurrent gastric cancer affecting the upper and lower gastrointestinal tract usually experience obstructive symptoms, causing a severe compromise in their quality of life. Surgery may not be feasible because of the patient's precarious medical condition and multilevel tumor infiltration. When faced with these circumstances, surgeons have few options. Parenteral nutrition and comfort measures are utilized when surgical bypass is not a tenable option. We herein describe a unique case of multilevel upper and lower gastrointestinal obstruction secondary to recurrent gastric cancer. The patient was treated palliatively through a combined surgical, radiological, and endoscopic approach by implanting a series of self-expanding metallic stents. To our knowledge, there are no previous reports of successful management of simultaneous strictures of the upper and lower gastrointestinal tract using this technique.

Seventy patients 48-93 years of age underwent standard percutaneous transluminal angioplasty (PTA) for femoropopliteal artery occlusions 1-10 cm long. PTA was accomplished through an antegrade puncture of the common femoral artery. The angiographic criterion for technical success was restoration of the vessel lumen with no significant residual stenosis. The authors report technical success in 64 (91%) of their patients, an improvement over a technical success rate of 74% in their previous series of 46 other PTA patients with occlusions 1-20 cm long. In this series, no complications related to PTA necessitated emergency surgical intervention. Refinements in PTA can be attributed to changes in patient selection and medication, improvements in balloon catheters and guide wires, and greater proficiency on the part of angiographers. This update reflects currently achievable results with standard angioplasty techniques, and it is against such results that all new vascular recanalization techniques, including laser-assisted PTA, should be compared.