Femoral artery catheterization complications: a study of 503 consecutive patients.

This report describes a prospective randomized trial of 503 patients who underwent a cardiac catheterization or interventional procedure at a single institution. In an effort to study femoral complications postprocedure, we evaluated three methods of femoral artery hemostasis as well as 38 variables that were felt to potentially relate to local complications. Only a marginally significant relationship between the hemostasis method and complication rate was found. The factors that contributed to femoral artery complications were: restarting heparin postsheath removal, number of procedures done during one hospitalization, noncompliance of the patient with bedrest after the procedure, number of arterial punctures to initiate the procedure, and preprocedure treatment with corticosteroids.