Introduction: The first-choice vascular access to starting dialysis in patients with End Stage Renal Disease (ESRD) is autogenous distal arteriovenous-fistula (AVF) to spare vascular district avoiding proximal fistula complications. One of most significant exclusion criteria to create distal AVF is still now the presence of huge calcification of the feeding artery due to large numbers of early failure (EF) and failure in maturation (FTM). In recent years the possibility to use new devices able to deliver intravascular lithotripsy (IVL) to treat high calcified stenosis could be a possibility to recruit these marginal arteries to create distal AVF.
Methods: ESRD patients with totally calcified radial artery wall were enrolled to participate to this prospective, single arm, multicentric study. The selected patients were treated with intraoperative IVL at surgical time, during anastomosis creation to soften calcified radial artery. Patients were followed 1 month after surgery with eco-doppler, for flow and vessels maturation assessment. At 3 month was investigated how many patients have started dialysis treatment with two needle cannulation and good efficiency.
Results: Nineteen distal forearm radio-cephalic fistula were built in 19 patients. One-month doppler assessment showed mean AVF flow of 743 ml/min and efferent vein caliper of 6.46 mm. At 3 months 14 patient have started stable 2 needles dialysis (other three patients were not yet dialysis dependent CKD). Were observed one immediate failure, one failure in maturation, and two late failures at 4 and 16 months respectively. Sixteen months primary and secondary patency was 78.9% and 89.5% respectively.
Conclusion: These results showed how intraoperative IVL could help to recruit huge calcified marginal artery to create autogenous distal forearm AVF, avoiding proximal AVF, risking distal ischemia syndrome, and sparing vascular district to eventually rebuilt more proximal AVF in future.
Keywords: AV fistula; ITA; IVL; artery; calcified; dialysis access; fistula; radial; shockwave.