Incidence of Radial Artery Loss Among Cases After Coronary Angiography

Objective: To evaluate the incidence of radial artery loss among patients following coronary angiography. Methodsology: A prospective cohort study was carried out at Cardiology Department of PIMS from January 2022 to December 2023. Patients aged 18 years old or above, both gender who were undergoing coronary angiography radial route for various indications in cardiac center at PIMS were included. All patients had radial artery cannulation with 6 French sheath. Patient who had only coronary angiography, their sheaths were removed just after completion of the procedure. Patients who had PCI their sheaths were removed after 4 hours of completion of procedure. Patients who had PCI were loaded with antiplatelet medications. Patients were followed in OPD after 2 to 3weeks. All of the information was entered and analyzed using SPSS version 26. Results: Mean age of the patients was 56.52+10.69 years. Male were 70.3%, and females were 29.7%. Left radial artery was not palpable in 0.2% (1 patient). For the right radial artery, 10.3% had a non-palpable artery. Overall, this data indicates that 10.8% of the patients had a non-palpable right radial artery after the procedure. There was no significant association found of radial artery loss with age, gender, diabetes, hypertension and smoking history (p=>0.05), however its incidence observed significantly higher among patients who underwent PCI (p-0.001). Conclusion: The incidence of asymptomatic complication of radial artery loss observed to the be 10.8% among patients undergoing coronary angiography via radial route. However, PCI was noted to be a significant predictor.