Arterial and Venous Complications Early After Cardiac Catheterization in Children and Adolescents: A Prospective Study

 This prospective study was designed with the aim to evaluate the prevalence and risk factors of arterial and venous complications among children and adolescents during cardiac catheterization.

 All patients younger than 18 years who underwent cardiac catheterization from April 2016 to April 2017 were consecutively enrolled in this study.

 A total of 179 vascular accesses were performed, and most (70%) cases were interventional procedures. Totally 17 (14%) arterial and 16 (13%) venous events occurred, while 4% and 5% of them, respectively, were more serious. Half of the patients who underwent axillary artery access developed major or minor trauma, and these subtracted from total events of artery accesses, only 9% of femoral arteries developed minor or major complications. The more serious arterial complications were dissection, pseudo-aneurysm and fistula whereas in venous access they were pseudo-aneurysm and thrombosis. Serious and non-serious complications considered together, the mean age of those without complication was 1.9 ± 3.6 years and in complicated group it was 1.7 ± 2.6 years (P = 0.33), and the mean weight of non-complicated cases was 9.27 ± 7.9 kg and 8.51 ± 8.12 kg in the complicated group with no significant difference (P = 0.41), whereas the incidence of more serious vascular complications was highest among patients younger than 1 year of age, and less than 9 kilograms. 23% of the cases who underwent more than 3 tries for arterial and 100% for venous access showed the complications. Also few arterial tries resulted in unintentional venous complications and vice versa. None of the cases needed surgical or interventional therapy.

 Our study showed that venous complications are as high as arterial complications, although most of them are self-limited.