Treatment of peripheral vascular diseases--basic data from the nationwide vascular registry FINNVASC

A national vascular registry, the FINNVASC registry, was introduced in Finland in the beginning of 1991. The registry covers the whole country--Finland has a population of 5.0 million habitants. During the first two years 8047 procedures were registered together with a 30-day follow-up. The number of surgical operations amounted to 5494 (68.3%), while the remaining 2553 procedures were endovascular. 22% of the surgical and 6.9% of the endovascular procedures were made as emergencies; about 10% of any procedure were reoperations. The indications for surgery were chronic limb ischaemia in 40.2% and acute limb ischaemia in 11.9%. Surgery of abdominal aortic aneurysm was indicated in 13.1% and surgical procedures in the aortocervical region in 13.3%. Access surgery was performed in 8.0% of the patients. Chronic limb ischaemia was the main indication, 92.1%, for the endovascular procedures, and renal artery stenosis was the second most frequent endovascular procedure, 2.7%. The mean length of hospital stay for surgical patients was 10.7 days and for patients treated with endovascular procedures 4.7 days. Patient outcome of 30 days of follow-up was comparable with the reports from other centres.