1 Introduction
Coronary heart disease (CHD) is one of the most common cardiovascular
diseases in clinical practice. Coronary angiography (CAG) and
percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI) are the main diagnostic and
therapeutic methods for CHD. Transfemoral access is the earliest access
site proposed for both CAG and PCI (1). Transfemoral
access is easily accessible even in hypotensive patients but, on the
other hand, it may lead to a high incidence of complications (e.g.,
arteriovenous fistula and pseudoaneurysm) and the postoperative
immobilization time is long. Therefore, the application of transradial
access (TRA) for CAG and PCI was first reported in 1993 by Kiemeneij et
al. (2). To date, the TRA has become the preferred
method for CAG and PCI (3). However, the
TRA-associated complications are noteworthy, such as radial artery
occlusion (RAO). Although some preventive strategies have been recently
adopted for RAO, the incidence of RAO is still as high as 3.7%(4). Therefore, Kiemeneij et al. (5)reported the use of dTRA for CAG and PCI for the first time in 2017.
To date, randomized controlled clinical trials and meta-analyses have
shown that CAG and PCI using dTRA can significantly reduce the incidence
of RAO (6-8). Will the dTRA become the preferred
method for CAG and PCI in the future? The puncture success rate of the
dTRA is lower than that of the TRA (6, 7). The
diameter of the distal radial artery is smaller than that of the radial
artery, which is one of the most important reasons affecting the
puncture success rate. At present, there are very few studies about the
diameter of the distal radial artery.