What You Should Know About Vascular Access Monitoring and Surveillance

By DeLynn Huff, BS, RN, CNN
The Kidney Times

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As a patient using a graft or fistula for dialysis, one of your highest priorities for maintaining your health and well-being is to make sure that your vascular access is working properly. Problems with your access can decrease the effectiveness of your treatments and lead to hospitalization or loss of your access. What can be done to help keep your access working properly?

Detecting and Treating Stenosis
The most important issue in access care is the detection and treatment of hemodynamically significant stenosis, or narrowing of the blood vessel by at least 50%, and repair of the access to return it to full function. Most people have some narrowing in their blood vessels, but it can cause serious problems for a dialysis patient when the narrowing occurs in the dialysis access.

If a significant stenosis is not treated, it may cause the access to clot off. If your access clots, a declotting procedure, called a thrombectomy, needs to be performed. Thrombectomies can be complicated procedures, and the results are not always successful, so the access might fail anyway.

Full story: Best access for hemodialysis patients is an arteriovenous (AV) fistula