Percutaneous coronary intervention complications and guide catheter size: bigger is not better.

Objectives: We evaluated the association between guiding catheter size and complications of percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI).

Background: The association between guiding catheter size and complications of PCI in contemporary practice remains controversial.

Methods: Procedure and outcome variables from 103,070 consecutive patients that underwent PCI with 6-F (n = 64,335), 7-F (n = 32,676), and 8-F (n = 6,059) guide catheters were compared.

Results: Compared with 6-F guides, PCIs performed with 7- and 8-F guides were associated with incrementally more contrast agent use, and more post-PCI complications including contrast-induced nephropathy, vascular access site complications, bleeding, transfusion, major adverse cardiac event, and death. After multivariate analysis, the use of larger guides were associated with a higher risk of contrast-induced nephropathy (7-F odds ratio [OR]: 1.18, p = 0.0004; 8-F OR: 1.44, p < 0.0001), vascular complications (7-F OR: 1.19, p = 0.0002, 8-F OR: 1.68, p < 0.0001), decline in hemoglobin >3 g/dl (7-F OR: 1.12, p < 0.0001, 8-F OR: 1.72, p < 0.0001), and post-procedure blood transfusion (7-F OR: 1.08, p = 0.03; 8-F OR: 1.80, p < 0.0001), whereas major adverse cardiac events (7-F OR: 1.06, p = 0.13; 8-F OR: 1.37, p < 0.0001) and in-hospital mortality (7-F OR: 1.11, p = 0.13; 8-F OR: 1.34, p = 0.03) were increased with 8-F but not 7-F guides.

Conclusions: Compared with 6-F guides, PCIs performed with 7- and 8-F guides were associated with more contrast medium use, renal complications, bleeding, vascular access site complications, greater need for post-procedure transfusion, and 8-F guides with increased nephropathy requiring dialysis, in-hospital major adverse cardiac events, and mortality. These data suggest that selection of smaller guide catheters may result in improved clinical outcome in patients undergoing contemporary PCI.