Current Retrograde Approach Is Unfavorable to Long-Term Clinical Outcomes after Percutaneous Coronary Intervention...

Surgeons currently use two different wire-based approaches to recanalize coronary chronic total occlusion (CTO): antegrade and retrograde. It has been demonstrated that the retrograde approach has improved the procedural success rate, but it remains unclear whether the retrograde approach is better than the antegrade approach for the long term. In this study, we enrolled a total of 187 patients with a diagnosis of CTOs. We evaluated the baseline characteristics of these patients and performed percutaneous coronary intervention to treat their problems by using either antegrade or retrograde approaches and different techniques in both groups. In the antegrade approach, we used three techniques: single wire, parallel wire, and side branch. The techniques in retrograde included kissing wire, controlled antegrade and retrograde subintimal tracking (CART), and reverse CART. We found that the antegrade and retrograde groups had similar baseline characteristics, with a few minor differences. Most importantly, we found that within 1 yr of the recanalizing procedure, the restenosis rate and major adverse cardiac event rate of the retrograde group were significantly higher compared to the antegrade group. We conclude that the retrograde approach may not be as beneficial as the antegrade approach for long-term clinical outcomes.