© 2024
NPR for Northern Colorado
Play Live Radio
Next Up:
0:00
0:00
0:00 0:00
Available On Air Stations

Best Route To Heart May Be Through Your Wrist

Let's be clear, this isn't a post about Valentine's Day, or anything else romantic.

Just the opposite. If you've got real, honest-to-goodness heartache caused by medical problems, there's a pretty good chance you'll get a catheter snaked into the arteries feeding your heart to check for a blockage and maybe put in some stents. More than one million Americans a year get these cardiac catheterizations.

Usually the doctor gets started with an incision in your groin and pushes the catheter through a femoral artery. Not fun. But, as the Wall Street Journal' sRon Winslow reports, some cardiologists are pushing an alternate route.

They say going through an artery in the wrist, though a little more demanding on the doctors, has safety advantages for the patients. Snaking the catheter through a radial artery lowers a patient's risk of bleeding.

In the U.S., only about 8 percent of catheterizations are done through the wrist, though that's about quadruple the rate of of four years ago. In some European countries more than half the procedures are done through the wrist.

As one patient who'd had catheterizations both ways told Winslow about the newer method, "It was like going from something caveman archaic to modern medicine."

Poor circulation can mean the wrist approach isn't a good idea. Ask your doctor about the alternatives, if you're interested.

And don't be bashful about asking if the procedure is really necessary. A big study published last year found that about 200,000 Americans who undergo angiograms each year don't get very useful information from the tests. The problem is, it's hard to know ahead of time who will benefit and who won't.

Copyright 2020 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

Scott Hensley edits stories about health, biomedical research and pharmaceuticals for NPR's Science desk. During the COVID-19 pandemic, he has led the desk's reporting on the development of vaccines against the coronavirus.