Safety of percutaneous transfemoral coronary and peripheral procedures via aortofemoral synthetic vascular grafts.

Our objective was to evaluate the safety of percutaneous transfemoral catheterization performed by way of synthetic aortofemoral vascular grafts. Between 1994 and 2003, 123 catheterization procedures were performed using a synthetic aortofemoral graft (median graft age 2.5 years, range 4 days to 10.3 years), including 63 (51%) interventional and 60 (49%) diagnostic procedures. Adverse events related to vascular access occurred in 7 of 123 procedures (5.7%), including blood transfusion (4.1%), thrombotic occlusion (1.6%), transient limb ischemia (0.8%), and retroperitoneal hemorrhage (0.8%). No deaths, graft infections, or pseudoaneurysms occurred.