Healing Complications with Plastic Arterial Implants

Defective healing of wounds in angioplastic surgery has always been attended by very serious consequences. In the days of the use of homografts, either wound infection or faulty healing of an anastomotic line almost invariably led to the loss of the graft, and indeed at times to the loss of limb or life. With the use of plastic prostheses, unsatisfactory wound healing has taken on a somewhat different aspect, but it still remains an ominous event. Whether the failure to heal kindly and completely affects the entire operative area or is limited to the anastomotic line, the complications that arise from it are potentially grave. In spite of their importance, however, these complications till now have only sporadically been mentioned in the literature.1-3It will, therefore, be of some interest to describe the types, incidence, causes, and treatment of defective healing in a series of reconstructive arterial operations using