History
The technique of angiography itself was first developed in 1927 by the Portuguese physician Egas Moniz at the University of Lisbon for cerebral angiography, the viewing of brain vasculature by X-ray radiation with the aid of a contrast medium introduced by catheter.
Coronary catheterization was first performed in 1929 when the German physician Werner Forssmann inserted a plastic tube in his cubital vein and guided it to the right chamber of the heart. He took an x-ray to prove his success and published it on November 5, 1929 with the title "Über die Sondierung des rechten Herzens" (About probing of the right heart).
In the early 1940s, André Cournand, in collaboration with Dickinson Richards, performed more systematic measurements of the hemodynamics of the heart. For their work in the discovery of cardiac catheterization and hemodynamic measurements, Cournand, Forssmann, and Richards shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1956.
In 1960 F. Mason Sones, a pediatric cardiologist at the Cleveland Clinic, accidentally injected radiocontrast in a coronary artery instead of the left ventricle. Although the patient had a reversible cardiac arrest, Sones and Shirey developed the procedure further, and are credited with the discovery (Connolly 2002); they published a series of 1,000 patents in 1966 (Proudfit et al.).
Since the late 1970s, building on the pioneering work of Charles Dotter in 1964 and especially Andreas Gruentzig starting in 1977, coronary catheterization has been extended to therapeutic uses: (a) the performance of less invasive physical treatment for angina and some of the complications of severe atherosclerosis, (b) treating heart attacks before complete damage has occurred and (c) research for better understanding of the pathology of coronary artery disease and atherosclerosis.
In the early 1960s, cardiac catheterization frequently took several hours and involved significant complications for as many as 2–3% of patients. With multiple incremental improvements over time, simple coronary catheterization examinations are now commonly done more rapidly and with significantly improved outcomes.
Read more about this topic: Coronary Catheterization
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