Critical Appraisal of the Contemporary Use of Atherectomy to Treat Femoral-Popliteal Atherosclerotic Disease

OBJECTIVE

Atherectomy has become increasingly used as an endovascular treatment of lower extremity atherosclerotic disease in the United States. Concerns and controversies about its indication and outcomes exist. The goal of this systematic review and meta-analysis was to investigate the outcomes and complications related to atherectomy to treat femoropopliteal atherosclerotic disease.

METHODS

A systematic review following the recommendations of the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) statement was performed. Four major scientific repositories, MEDLINE, EMBASE, The Cochrane Library, and Thompson Web of Sciences were queried from their inception to April 5, 2020. Data was reviewed and entered in a dedicated dataset by the investigators. Outcomes included patency rates, clinical and hemodynamic improvement, and morbidity and mortality associated with atherectomy interventions.

RESULTS

Twenty-four studies encompassing 1900 patients met inclusion criteria for this study. 74.3% of patients presented with Rutherford class (RC) 1-3 and 25.7% presented with RC class 4-6. 1445 patients underwent atherectomy, and 455 patients were treated without atherectomy. Atherectomy patients underwent directional atherectomy (DA, n = 851), rotational atherectomy (RA, n = 851), laser atherectomy (LA, n = 201), and orbital atherectomy (OA, n = 78). The majority of patients additionally received adjunct treatments which were variable across studies and included a combination of stenting, balloon angioplasty (BA), or drug coated balloon (DCB) angioplasty. Technical success was achieved in 92.3% of cases. Distal embolization, vessel perforation, and dissection occurred in 3.4%, 1.9%, and 4% of cases respectively. Initial patency was 95.4% and at 12-month median follow up primary patency was 72.6%. ABI improved from pre-operative mean of 0.6 to post-operative mean of 0.84. Incidence of major amputation and mortality over the follow up period was 2.2% and 3.4% respectively.

CONCLUSIONS

This review of the published data suggests that femoropopliteal atherectomy can be completed safely while modestly improving ABIs and maintaining one-year patency in nearly three out of four patients; however, this is based on heterogeneous studies that skew generalizable conclusions about atherectomy's efficacy. Atherectomy places a high cost burden on the healthcare system and is utilized in the United States at a higher rate than in other countries. Our review of the literature does not demonstrate clear atherectomy superiority to alternatives that would warrant pervasive and increasing use of this costly technology. Future work should focus on developing high quality randomized controlled trials to determine specific patient and lesion characteristics in which atherectomy can add value.

Is vessel prep necessary before treating the superficial femoral artery?

The standard of care for treating symptomatic peripheral arterial disease has been percutaneous transluminal angioplasty with or without stenting over the last couple of years. This endovascular treatment of claudicants or patients with critical limb ischemia has increased in numbers and has even surpassed open surgery. Our daily practice has evolved to an endovascular-first approach, especially in the femoropopliteal region, being the most frequently treated vessel. However, neointimal hyperplasia and elastic recoil leading to target lesion restenosis or occlusion after initial successful treatment is not uncommon. In recent years, drug-eluting technologies on balloons or stents have been investigated as a potential solution for this problem with excellent results compared to plain-old balloon angioplasty. Nonetheless in the majority of those trials, the bailout stenting rate increased with lesion complexity, albeit it in long or heavily calcified lesions due to flow-limiting dissections, elastic recoil or the calcium barrier preventing adequate drug uptake. There is a need for vessel preparation in order to ameliorate drug delivery, especially in complex lesions. Multiple devices are available to prepare even the most challenging lesions for drug uptake or stenting, by achieving maximal luminal gain and by minimizing dissections. This review aims to give an overview of the most common modalities for vessel preparation in the superficial femoral artery beside plain old balloon angioplasty together with an overview of the current literature of each device in the superficial femoral artery.