Endovascular treatment of dysfunctional hemodialysis catheters.

Hemodialysis-catheter dysfunction is a common clinical condition in nephrology. Like other central venous devices, hemodialysis-catheters show a disposition for partial or complete thrombotic obstruction and fibrin sleeve formation. Thrombolytic infusion is recommended as therapy of first choice. Alternative interventional strategies include over-the-wire catheter exchange, mechanical fibrin sleeve stripping with a snare and angioplastic sleeve disruption. Those approaches show extremely variable results with mediocre long-term patency rates. Therefore, catheter-avoiding strategies should be considered in detail and AV-fistula creation preferred.