Cardiac Catheterization Who Needs It

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Your healthcare provider may recommend cardiac catheterization to find out what is causing symptoms of a heart problem or to treat or repair a heart problem.

Cardiac catheterization can be used for different purposes.

• Give a better understanding of other test results, such as echocardiography (echo), cardiac MRI, and cardiac CT scan. This is especially helpful if the results from those tests could not identify the problem or differ from what your doctor finds when examining you.
• Diagnose heart conditions such as arrhythmia, heart attack, pulmonary hypertension, cardiomyopathy, coronary heart disease, and heart valve diseases, including aortic stenosis and mitral regurgitation.
• Evaluate you before a possible heart surgery, such as a heart transplant.
• Measure oxygen levels and blood pressure in the chambers of your heart and the pulmonary arteries.

Your doctor may do other procedures to diagnose or treat your condition during cardiac catheterization.

• Collect biopsies of small samples of heart tissue for more laboratory testing. Biopsies can be used for genetic testing, to check for myocarditis (a type of heart inflammation), or to look for transplant rejection.
• Use coronary angiography to look at the heart or blood vessels by injecting dye through the catheter.
• Perform minor heart surgery to treat congenital heart defects and replace or widen narrowed heart valves.
• Use percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI) to open narrowed or blocked areas of the coronary arteries. PCI may include balloon dilation, also known as angioplasty , or stent placement. Most people who have heart attacks or underlying heart disease have narrowed or blocked coronary arteries.
• Apply catheter ablation to treat arrythmias.