“Could have played soccer within an hour,” is not what one typically hears from a patient describing his or her experience of coronary catheterization and angioplasty. But it is now starting to happen in the Kingdom. An innovative approach to cardiac catheterization, a heart treatment pioneered in the 1950s, is making the procedure easier and safer for patients. The low-risk and quick procedure is taking a new learning curve in the Kingdom, opening the way to outpatient coronary angioplasty. The traditional femoral artery with a flexible, hollow catheter placed in the patient's groin up to the heart may soon cease to be the preferred access site for coronary procedures. In the transradial catheterization method, however, using a guidewire, the catheter is gently introduced into the patient's artery through a small incision in the wrist, reaching more key arteries than through the groin. It is also a low risk operation as nerves travel in the middle of the wrist, away from the arteries, whereas in the leg, they travel very close together resulting in nerve damage at times. In less than an hour, the physician can perform a diagnostic angiography to determine the appropriate next steps or conduct an actual angioplasty and ballooning the artery, said Canada-trained Dr. Muhammad Belghaith Al-Bargi, head of Cardiac Cath Lab at King Abdul Aziz Medical City of the National Guard in Riyadh. Setting the stage for this method to be used in the Kingdom's hospitals, a workshop was recently organized at the Medical City in Riyadh with the participation of around 80 experts from the Kingdom and across the globe including Stefan Hoffman, a renowned German scholar in cardiology. “The method is believed to change the lives of up to 50 percent of heart patients across the Kingdom safely and quickly,” said Dr. Al-Bargi, who also coordinated and supervised the workshop. Mobilization time, length of hospital stay, and expenses have all been found to be reduced after transradial percutaneous coronary intervention. The new coronary angiogram procedure, which was once stressful, would now allow the patient to function normally within only two hours, he said. During the workshop, speakers addressed the method applications and latest research on it. Five Saudi patients were successfully treated using the new procedure in the Cardiac Center Cath labs at the Medical City. Cardiologists at the workshop had a good chance to take part in this procedure utilizing the expertise of Dr. Hoffman who expressed his great appreciation for the high quality standards of Saudi professionals and the facilities available which stand on equal footing with those in Europe and the United States. __
