February 1998

Marin General is one of the first medical centers in the San Francisco Bay Area to offer a quick, low cost, and relatively painless new procedure to diagnose and treat coronary artery disease.

The procedure, called transradial angioplasty, is sometimes referred to as wrist angioplasty because a thin tube and wire is threaded through the wrist to diagnose and unblock clogged heart arteries.

For many patients, transradial angioplasty replaces two traditional methods, cardiac catheterization, which diagnoses the blockage, and balloon angioplasty, which clears the blockage. Both generally use an artery in the groin as the point of entry.

More than 250,000 patients nationwide undergo these procedures annually.

Transradial angioplasty allows most patients to sit up right away and walk within an hour or two after completion. They are no longer required to stay in bed for six hours with weights on their groins to stop bleeding.