Dr. Olivier Bertrand
For the next three days, scores of interventional cardiologists will be gathering in New York City for the Second Annual AIM-RADIAL Master Class where they will hear talks, engage in roundtable discussions, watch live case demonstrations, and be thoroughly immersed in advanced state-of-the-art techniques, the latest data and the most current evidence-based medicine regarding all aspects of the transradial technique for diagnostic angiography and percutaneous interventions.
Placing stents via the radial artery in the wrist has been gaining momentum in the United States: its use has increased 13-fold in the past five years alone and by the end of this year approximately 1 in 5 angioplasty or diagnostic procedures in the U.S. will be done from the wrist.
The faculty for the AIM-RADIAL course is impressive and international which is only fitting since many countries in Europe and Asia have been utilizing the transradial approach in half or more of all procedures for a number of years. The names represent the pioneers and luminaries in this field: Kiemeneij, Saito, Patel, Coppola, Mann, Pyne and many more. You can see the complete faculty list on the AIM-RADIAL website; many of these faculty are also represented in interviews or news features on Angioplasty.Org (our Transradial Center has been online since 2007).
AIM-RADIAL is organized by a committee of transradial experts, and coordinated by interventional cardiologist Olivier F. Bertrand, MD, PhD, FSCAI of the Quebec Heart-Lung Institute and Associate-Professor, Faculty of Medicine at Laval University. Dr. Bertrand has put together a wide ranging program which this reporter will be writing and tweeting about during the three days. You can follow me on Twitter at @angioplastyorg or look up the hashtag #AIMRADIAL.
The meeting will start on Thursday with a special live case from France, a first in fact. At 10:15am EDT, Dr. Jean Fajadet of Clinique Pasteur in Toulouse will perform a renal denervation procedure from the wrist!
It turns out that accessing the kidneys from the radial artery in the wrist is simpler and more straight-forward than from the femoral artery in the groin. A limitation has been the necessary size of the renal denervation catheter. But those sizes have gotten narrower, so it is now possible to do. Dr. Bertrand told me that the radial approach may become the default for renal denervation procedures in the future.
More to come.
Late Update: The AIM-RADIAL Meeting is being live-streamed. A link is on the home page of the meeting website. The meeting abstracts are also available in the Journal of Invasive Cardiology.
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