Excerpts from recent Wall Street Journal article highlighting the new advancement of Radial Catheterization as the safer route to heart treatment.
“Patients undergoing one of cardiology’s most common procedures are typically required to lie nearly perfectly still on their backs for about four hours to reduce the chance of a serious bleeding complication… Called cardiac catheterization, it is used to perform angiograms that detect blockages in arteries and deploy stents to prop open treated vessels that provide the critical blood supply to the heart’s muscle. The procedure is carried out on more than one million U.S. patients each year. In the vast majority of cases, doctors begin the technique–which involves threading a thin plastic tube called a catheter into the heart–by making a puncture wound in the groin…
Now cardiologists are increasingly initiating catheterization in the wrist instead, called Radial Catheterization. A major driver of the change is emerging concern about the risk of bleeding–a potentially life-threatening problem especially associated with the entry point in the groin…
John Coppola, a cardiologist at the Cardiac & Vascular Institute at New York University’s Langone Medical Center in Manhattan says “Bleeding complications after [a catheterization] aren’t as benign as we thought,”. Although serious adverse events are rare in such procedures, ‘if you bleed, it increases your mortality risk and your risk of having a recurrent cardiac event.’ Using the wrist means doctors are getting access to the heart through the radial artery in the arm rather than the femoral artery, which delivers blood to the lower extremities. While technically more challenging for doctors, the radial technique is associated with fewer bleeding complications and better long-term results for patients in a growing number of studies.
In regards to traditional Catheterization there are rare instances when the femoral artery bleeds unnoticed beneath the skin and blood pools in a space in the lower back. That can lead to blood transfusions and a cascade of other events including surgery to repair the vessel and potentially deadly infections that add major expense to the treatment. In contrast, the radial artery is smaller and right under the surface of the skin, and it responds quickly to pressure. “From the radial access, bleeding is almost nonexistent, says Ramon Quesada, medical director of interventional cardiology at the Baptist Cardiac and Vascular Institute in Miami who has performed about 5,000 catheterizations via the radial artery…
Paul Osofsky, a retired financial planner from Staten Island, N.Y., is convinced. His first catheterization 18 years ago left him saddled with a sandbag for four hours to keep pressure on his groin while the wound healed and then kept him away from his daily gym workouts for nearly a month. Now 66, Mr. Osofsky had a second procedure done via the radial artery by NYU’s Dr. Coppola. He was home from the hospital in two hours and back to the gym in three days. Mr. Osofsky said “It was like going from something caveman archaic to modern medicine”…
Northside Cardiology P.C. is the only cardiology group in metro Atlanta dedicated to Radial Artery Catheterization. Dr. Jack Chen directs a training program on this technique for physicians from surrounding states and speaks nationally and internationally on this and other cardiology topics. He utilizes the radial approach in 95% of his cases, more than any other cardiologist in greater Atlanta and recently performed a live case on Fox 5 News here.
You can read the Wall Street Journal Article in its entirety here.
(Excerpts from this communication were derived from the original article written by Ron Winslow for the Wall Street Journal, Article: “Wrist May Be Route to Safer Heart Treatment.” Published Feb. 8, 2011)
