Uncrossable lesions are those that cannot be crossed with a balloon after successful guidewire crossing. These lesions are challenging and are commonly encountered in tortuous and calcified arteries as well as chronic total occlusions. They are the second most common barrier to successful PCI in CTO intervention after inability to cross the CTO segment with a guidewire. Procedures involving balloon uncrossable lesions during routine and CTO PCI utilise longer procedural times, radiation dose and contrast volumes with a lower likelihood of procedural success. In this article, we describe a pragmatic approach of managing balloon uncrossable lesions utilising the most contemporary equipment available in an algorithmic fashion beginning with simple, cost effective techniques right up to complex strategies for advanced operators. In addition, some of these lesions, even when crossed by any technique, they may remain difficult to dilate and prepare for stent insertion. We describe an approach of how to manage these undilatable lesions.
Current guidelines recommend percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI) in patients with ongoing stable angina symptoms despite optimal medical therapy (OMT), although trials have shown no reduction in death or myocardial infarction. The recently published ORBITA trial compared OMT + PCI with OMT + ‘placebo’ PCI in patients with angina and single-vessel coronary artery disease (CAD), and found no significant difference in treadmill exercise time between the two groups after six weeks. The trial concluded that invasive procedures can be assessed with placebo control while numerous editorials interpreted the trial as showing that PCI has no role in the management of stable angina. However, the highly selected patient population, low ischaemic burden and level of symptoms and high proportion of nonflow-limiting stenoses on invasive physiological testing mean that, while ground-breaking in terms of its methodology, ORBITA does not add to the current evidence base supporting ischaemia-guided revascularisation if symptoms are not controlled on medical therapy alone.
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