Current Practices in Carotid Surgery

We outline the indications and contraindications of carotid endarterectomy (CEA) and appraise four key areas still debated to this day; shunting versus non-shunting, patch angioplasty (PA) versus primary closure (PC) and local anaesthesia (LA) versus general anaesthesia (GA). Importantly, we compare CEA with Best Medical Therapy (BMT), which is an area that is still largely debated, principally because many of the studies conducted to date do not reflect the era of modern BMT practices, and these outcomes are eagerly awaited. Literature searches were conducted using Pubmed with the keywords 'carotid', and 'endarterectomy', which provided a wide variety of journals and articles. We further stratified our data by using only randomised control trials (RCTs), meta-analyses, and systematic reviews, and then excluded studies with asymptomatic disease, diabetes, and plaque-imaging studies, including studies that did not fit our four desired topics for discussion. For each of the different domain's, results demonstrated similar peri-operative outcomes when comparing shunting vs. non-shunting and modality of anaesthesia and therefore practice still remains dependent on operator experience and preference. Patch-angioplasty reduces the risk of subsequent stroke, transient ischaemic attack (TIA), and re-stenosis compared to PC. In carotid stenosis >50% BMT offers limited benefits without accompanying surgical intervention and BMT alone tends to be advantageous primarily for patients with <50% carotid stenosis. Where CEA is appraised in terms of superiority of the procedural components; the literature does not support wildly contrasting outcomes to change majority practice. However, the area of considerable interest is superiority of BMT to surgical intervention in terms of both carotid artery stenting (CAS) and CEA and more studies need to be conducted in this area.