Brazilian Interventional Cardiology and Chronic Coronary Occlusions: Where Are We?

The coronary atherosclerotic disease has several facets of clinical presentation; chronic coronary occlusion (CCO) is one that produces total obstruction of the lumen of the vessel, known or presumed for three months or more. It is present in 16-18% of patients with significant coronary disease.

Percutaneous treatment of this type of lesion is almost as old as the first coronary angioplasty performed by Andreas Gruntzig in 1979. Martin Kaltenbach first performed it in Frankfurt in the late 1970s and by Geoffrey Hartzler in Kansas City in the following decades.^, Since then, the growing and spectacular incorporation of technology into medicine, especially in Interventional Cardiology, associated with the knowledge and expertise of new techniques dedicated to complex coronary interventions, which include CCO, have allowed great, safe, and effective advances in the approach to these lesions.

[…]