Dialysis access intervention: Techniques for the interventional cardiologist.

Interventional cardiologists who treat malfunctioning hemodialysis accesses play an important role in the life of patients with end-stage kidney disease (ESKD). By collaborating with interventional nephrologists who currently perform the bulk of routine access angiographic procedures, interventional cardiologists can fill an important gap in the care of ESKD patients by performing urgent or emergent procedures that fall outside the schedule of an outpatient interventional nephrology laboratory to ensure that hemodialysis patients will not miss a hemodialysis session or get a temporary catheter. This paper reviews the pathophysiology of dialysis access failure and illustrates the catheter-based approaches used by interventional cardiologists to treat malfunctioning dialysis accesses.