This weekend Richard R. Heuser, MD, FSCAI and John E. Lassetter, MD, FSCAI of St. Luke’s Hospital and Medical Center in Phoenix, Arizona will be conducting a one-day course in transradial (wrist) angioplasty at the Wynn/Encore Hotel in Las Vegas, Nevada. But the games of chance will be relegated to the casinos because, as Dr. Heuser recounts in his exclusive interview with Angioplasty.Org, the wrist approach to diagnostic and interventional coronary procedures is safer for patients, more comfortable for patients and (trumpet fanfare) has the potential to reduce costs of healthcare as well.
And Dr. Richard Heuser has been performing PCIs since the beginning days of balloons and stents — so his perspective on why the transradial approach offers significant benefits is definitely of import to cardiologists across the U.S.
As he states in his interview, if you utilize the transradial approach:
“…you’ll reduce your likelihood of vascular complications by four times, and if you look at the most comprehensive head to head trial, the RIVAL trial, you’ll see that you will not give up anything in terms of safety and efficacy. You will give up the fact that you will have more blood transfusions and more vascular complications going femorally and, if you look at the sites that were high volume radials, they actually had an improvement in hard outcomes — that’s MI, and morbidity, and mortality. So I think that if I could be so bold as to say, you’re doing your patients a disservice if you don’t at least consider radial an option in patients… even to the point that they request it…because the reality is, they are going to be requesting it.”
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