Cardiac Catheterization - Who Needs It - Who Needs It

Your doctor may recommend cardiac catheterization to help with diagnoses or plan treatment. It can be useful when your doctor wants to do any of the following:

• Better understand the results from other tests and procedures, such as echocardiography (echo), cardiac MRI, and cardiac CT scan, especially if other studies could not define the problem or if the results from other studies differ from what your doctor finds when examining you.
• Diagnose the cause of your chest pain, arrhythmia, or other signs and symptoms of a heart problem or evaluate you during an emergency such as a heart attack. The procedure may help your doctor diagnose heart conditions such as pulmonary hypertension, cardiomyopathy, ischemic heart disease, and heart valve diseases such as aortic stenosis and mitral regurgitation.
• Evaluate you before a possible heart transplant.
• Look at the pulmonary arteries for conditions, including pulmonary embolism, that can occur as a result of venous thromboembolism. The pulmonary arteries are the blood vessels that carry blood from your heart to your lungs, where the blood receives oxygen.
• Measure oxygen levels and pressures of the blood in your heart, such as in your ventricles , atria, and pulmonary arteries.

Your doctor may perform additional procedures to diagnose or treat your condition during cardiac catheterization. Some of these procedures include:

• Biopsies to take small samples of the heart tissue for further laboratory testing. Biopsies can be used for genetic testing or to check for myocarditis, a type of heart inflammation, or transplant rejection.
• Coronary angiography to look at the heart or blood vessels by injecting dye through the catheter.
• Minor heart surgery to treat congenital heart defects and replace or widen narrowed heart valves.
• Percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI) to open narrowed or blocked areas of the coronary arteries. PCI may include balloon dilation, or angioplasty , or stent placement. Most people who have heart attacks or underlying ischemic heart diseases have narrowed or blocked coronary arteries.

Your doctor may wait to do the procedure or recommend that you do not have cardiac catheterization if you have one of the following conditions:

• Abnormal electrolytes levels in your blood
• acute gastrointestinal bleeding
• Acute kidney failure, or severe kidney disease that is not being treated with dialysis
• Acute stroke
• Blood that is too thin from medicines such as warfarin or other causes
• High blood levels of a heart medicine called digoxin
• Previous severe allergic reaction to the dye that is used during cardiac catheterization
• Severe anemia, which is a lower-than-normal red blood cell count or hemoglobin
• Unexplained fever
• Untreated infection

• Read During Cardiac Catheterization to learn what happens during the procedure and possible risks and complications.