Is Coronary Angiography Dangerous?

Coronary angiography is a minimally invasive interventional examination method, and it is also the "gold standard" for clinical diagnosis of coronary heart disease. However, in daily life, many people do not have a clear understanding of this examination, and believe that coronary angiography is very harmful to the human body, and even life-threatening.

In fact, clinically, doctors generally only recommend patients with these conditions to undergo coronary angiography，Including unexplained ECG abnormalities, chest tightness and chest pain and other abnormal symptoms that are highly suspected of coronary heart disease, patients with a history of coronary heart disease with myocardial infarction, patients with severe stenosis in coronary CT examination, patients with re-stenosis after stent placement, and re-stenosis after cardiac surgery bypass surgery. Patients with angina pectoris.

In fact, coronary angiography does have certain risks, and the following five problems may arise.

1. Patients need to be given local anesthesia before the examination. Some patients are allergic to anesthesia and may cause anaphylactic shock

2. The contrast agent is an artificial compound, and in most cases, it will not bring risks to health. However, some patients may be allergic to contrast media, and some adverse reactions may occur after the examination;

3. Some patients may have abnormal arterial development, stenosis, spasm, etc., which will lead to puncture failure and need to change hands;

4. This examination requires repeated mechanical operations on the patient's heart, which may induce cardiopulmonary adverse events, such as ventricular fibrillation, malignant arrhythmia, etc.;

5. Coronary angiography will expose patients to ionizing radiation, but there is currently no evidence that coronary angiography will affect the clinical outcome of patients.

The occurrence probability of these adverse events is very low, basically maintained between 0.07% and 0.4%. This is an extremely low probability event, so patients and their families do not need to be overly afraid of it, and the best time for treatment should not be delayed due to excessive fear.

It is worth noting that although coronary angiography can detect many diseases, it is not suitable for everyone.

For these five groups of people, coronary angiography is not recommended.

1. Hypertensive patients: Hypertensive patients cannot undergo coronary angiography examination when their blood pressure fluctuates too much and their condition is unstable, otherwise accidents will easily occur.

2. Severe arrhythmia patients: patients with arrhythmia cannot be checked until they are effectively controlled, otherwise it will easily lead to aggravation of the disease.

3. Cardiac insufficiency: Under the premise of unstable control of heart failure, coronary angiography is likely to cause damage to the heart.

4. Patients who are prone to allergies: After using the contrast agent, the risk of allergies is very high in this group of people, and it is generally not recommended to have an examination.

5. People with severe renal dysfunction: after entering the body, the contrast agent needs to be excreted through renal metabolism. For some people with poor kidney function, coronary angiography will bring too much burden to the kidneys, and even induce contrast agent nephropathy.