Lesion Types Correlating with High Incidence of Complications after PTCA

The rate of major complications during peructaneous transluminal coronary angiography (PTCA) remained unchanged or declined during the last decade with growing operator experience and ongoing improvements in balloon and wire technology, despite the fact that today’s patient population might be expected to have a significantly higher risk for complications because of substantial differences in baseline characteristics such as multivessel disease, poor left ventricular function, and increased age. This fact has been clearly demonstrated by comparison of complication rates in the initial NHLBI PTCA registry cohort of 1977–1981, and the recent 1985/86 cohort [5,6,7,11].