What are the in-hospital outcomes and safety profiles of percutaneous coronary intervention for chronic total occlusion performed by expert European operators?
CTO PCI performed by expert operators yields high success and low complication rates, establishing a standard of care, though retrograde techniques are associated with increased procedural risks.
The first report of the ERCTO registry by the EuroCTO club shows a high procedural success rate obtained by expert European operators in a "real-world" consecutive series of patients, comparable with those reported by Japanese registries. The rate of observed procedural adverse events was low and similar to the non-CTO PCI series. In this registry, retrograde procedures were associated with extended fluoroscopy exposure and procedural time, increased contrast load administration as well as a higher incidence of coronary perforations. Such outcomes should become the standard of care that all centres undertaking CTO PCI should aspire to.
Galassi et al. (Mon,) studied this question.