OBJECTIVE To report on renal artery stenosis presenting as congestive heart failure. DESIGN Case series. SETTING Tertiary referral centre. PATIENTS Nine hypertensive subjects (five male, four female) seen in the blood pressure unit, St George's Hospital, between 1991 and 1997 with clinical signs and symptoms of congestive cardiac failure but without overt coronary or valvar heart disease....

Radial artery is one of the smaller terminal branches of brachial artery which originates at the level of neck of radius. During routine dissection, a lot of variations in the arterial pattern of the upper limb were encountered which ignited our curiosity to review literature regarding the normal anatomy and variations of radial artery. There is marked difference in the arrangement of these art...

OBJECTIVE To evaluate the clinical and angiographic outcome in patients with in-stent restenosis in small coronary arteries and repeat target lesion revascularisation. DESIGN Patients with in-stent restenosis in coronary arteries < or = 2.85 mm were eligible for the study and underwent target lesion revascularisation. Clinical and angiographic variables were assessed during a six month follow...

OBJECTIVES To determine whether patient sex makes a difference to in-hospital mortality and survival in patients undergoing isolated coronary artery bypass graft surgery (CABG) receiving a radial artery graft. METHODS Analysis of consecutive patients on a validated prospective cardiac surgery database was performed for patients undergoing isolated CABG. Uni- and multivariate analyses were per...

Worldwide, there is increasing interest in transradial intervention, as it appears safer, more cost-effective and is the preferred access route for patients over transfemoral intervention. The favorable neuroanatomical relationships of the radial artery mean that access-site complications are extremely rare. However, radial access-site complications do occur and we report a case of radial arter...

OBJECTIVE To investigate the impact of including private-sector data on assessments of equity of coronary revascularisation provision using NHS data only. DESIGN Analyses of hospital episodes statistics and private-sector data by age, sex and primary care trust (PCT) of residence. For each PCT, the share of London's total population and revascularisations (all admissions, NHS-funded, and priv...

In the years before direct revascularisation for drug-refractory angina pectoris, some indirect methods were explored to improve myocardial ischaemia. Carotid nerve stimulation activated by the patient when angina emerged and Vineberg surgery [1] with implantation of the free end of the mammary artery (started about 1963) are examples of desperate attempts to suppress untreatable symptoms. Both...

In this issue, Timmer et al. present interesting data on the outcome of coronary revascularisation in diabetic patients in the Netherlands. Based on the recommendation of an expert panel, they assigned all enrolled patients to one of three treatment options: coronary artery bypass grafting (CABG), percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI) or pharmacotherapy without revascularisation. In total 87...