Arterial and Venous Complications Early After Cardiac Catheterization in Children and Adolescents: A Prospective Study

Objectives: This prospective study was designed with the aim to evaluate the prevalence and risk factors of arterial and venous complications among children and adolescents during cardiac catheterization. Methods: All patients younger than 18 yearswhounderwent cardiac catheterization from April 2016 to April 2017 were consecutively enrolled in this study. Results: Atotal of 179 vascular accesses were performed, andmost(70%) cases were interventional procedures. Totally 17 (14%) arterial and 16 (13%) venous events occurred, while 4% and 5% of them, respectively, were more serious. Half of the patients who underwent axillary artery access developed major or minor trauma, and these subtracted from total events of artery accesses, only 9% of femoral arteries developed minor or major complications. The more serious arterial complications were dissection, pseudo-aneurysm and fistula whereas in venous access they were pseudo-aneurysm and thrombosis. Serious and non-serious complications considered together, the mean age of those without complication was 1.93.6 years and in complicated group it was 1.72.6 years (P = 0.33), and the mean weight of non-complicated cases was 9.27 7.9 kg and 8.51 8.12 kg in the complicated group with no significant difference (P = 0.41), whereas the incidence of more serious vascular complications was highest among patients younger than 1 year of age, and less than 9 kilograms. 23% of the cases who underwent more than 3 tries for arterial and 100% for venous access showed the complications. Also few arterial tries resulted in unintentional venous complications and vice versa. None of the cases needed surgical or interventional therapy. Conclusions: Our study showed that venous complications are as high as arterial complications, although most of them are selflimited.