pneumoniae serotype 14 growth; Dr. Maria Isabel Rodrigues (PROTIMIZA) for her assistance with the statistics. “
“Trans-radial percutaneous coronary intervention (TRI) is an evidence-based, patient-centered alternative to trans-femoral PCI (TFI) in the treatment of patients with chronic and acute coronary artery disease [1]. Relative to TFI, TRI reduces the risk of vascular and bleeding complications by 78% and the need for transfusion by 80%

[2]. Both observational and randomized trial data show that TRI is associated with lower total hospital costs [3] and [4]. Most importantly, radial access offers greater patient comfort, including lower bodily pain, lower back pain and greater walking ability, as well as earlier hospital discharge [4]. Despite the advantages of TRI, TFI has click here historically been the dominant access approach in the United States (US), and adoption of TRI in the US continues to lag behind other countries [5]. National registry data indicate that the radial artery approach accounts for approximately 16% of percutaneous coronary

interventions performed in the US [3]. The figure is similar in the US Veterans Health Administration (VHA), and currently only nine of the 65 VHA facilities that perform PCI use TRI in more than 50% of cases [6]. However, the reasons for this limited uptake are selleck screening library unclear. Some have suggested that there is a lack of compelling motivation for operators to switch to radial access; a dearth of training opportunities; significant logistical requirements, including having the support of cath lab staff and the availability of the right equipment; and a significant learning curve that, initially, entails longer procedures times and failures (i.e., failure via trans-radial and need to operate via femoral access) [1], [7] and [8]. However, there has been little empirical

study to systematically identify barriers to TRI adoption, and assess their prevalence and their association with TRI rates. To help close this gap, we conducted a national survey to assess the prevalence of attitudes through about and barriers among interventional cardiologists performing cardiac interventions in the VHA. We report descriptive findings. We conducted a structured web-based survey fielded to VHA interventional cardiologists nationally, and linked survey data to PCI data from the Cardiac Assessment Reporting and Tracking — Cath Lab (CART-CL) system, a VA cath lab data registry [9]. We report descriptive statistics stratified by cath lab level of TRI-use. The survey was designed and developed internally, and included measures of respondent demographics, including years since final training was completed; opinion about the superiority of radial versus femoral access for 7 criteria, such as technical results (i.e., being able to complete the case via radial access vs.