A comparative review of various interventional methods for coronary angiography and angioplasty

Coronary artery disease (CAD) is one of the most common diseases today. Among the diagnostic methods, angiography is the main and gold standard in the diagnosis Since angiography is an invasive procedure, this procedure complications range widely from minor problems with short term sequelae to life threatening ones may cause irreversible damage or even death.

This paper is a review study and papers published within the period of 2002-2017 were assessed. To obtain related scientific documents, web surfing was conducted in Persian and English using various keywords including angiography, coronary artery disease, angiography complications, patient satisfaction, femoral angiography, radial angiography, ulnar angiography, superficial palmar branch of ulnar artery, and snuff box angiography. Papers related to this subject were extracted from the Web of Science (ISI), PubMed, Magiran, Google Scholar, Elsevier, Ovid, and SID databases.

Out of the 100 retrieved studies, 31 (3 cross sectional, 1 analytical descriptive, 7 descriptive studies, 6 reviews, 2 RCT, 5 Cohorts, 1 Case Report, and 6 Case series) were entered into this study. In addition, 69 records were excluded for wrong statistics reported, duplicate studies, lack of enough information, and lack of relevance to this study.

According to most studies, the procedure via hand for angiography is better than the lower extremity (femoral). In addition, it seems that the use of distal upper extremities for angiography is better than the radial and ulnar method. However, more research evidence is strongly warranted.