“Are cardiac catheterization and cardiac angiography the same?”
My friend has had a heart attack and will need to undergo a cardiac catheterization. Is it the same as an angiography?
4 Answers
Yes
Those two terms are not exactly the same. Cardiac catheterization basically means putting catheters into the body typically perform a diagnostic procedure but occasionally associated with doing a therapeutic intervention as well. Cardiac or coronary angiography is a term that relates to the process of injecting contrast into or the heart arteries or other arteries in order to do imaging using x-ray digital acquisition to look at heart anatomy.
We typically use the terms interchangeably but a typical cardiac cauterization actually consists of 3 procedures: 1) left heart catherization where a catheter is inserted into the left lower heart chamber (left ventricle) to measure pressures, 2) bilateral selective coronary angiography where a catheter is inserted into the opening of the coronary arteries and contrast is injected to look for occlusions and 3) left ventriculography where contrast is injected into the left ventricle to see how well it contracts (squeezes).
Yes
