2025 February Newsletter

BSIR 2024 – WINNERS OF BEST POSTER PRIZES

As ever, we received a large number of high-quality abstracts for oral presentation during the Scientific Sessions and for poster prizes.

Not everyone gets to see the all of the posters, so to make it easy for you to review, here are the abstracts of the Poster Prizes from BSIR 2024.

EDUCATIONAL POSTERS

Tunneled haemodialysis catheter design and performance -a comprehensive review of the literature

Agarwal G1, Aljumaa J2, Dupont P3, Shaygi B4

1 Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust | Department of Radiology, London, United Kingdom, 2 King Faisal Specialisy Hospital and Research Center, Saudi Arabia, 3 The Royal Free London NHS Foundation Trust | Department of Nephrology, London, United Kingdom, 4 London North West University Healthcare NHS Trust, | Department of Interventional Radiology, London, United Kingdom

Purpose

Central venous catheters are increasingly used for haemodialysis vascular access in a significant proportion of patients. There have been many design innovations over the years, particularly relating to catheter tip-shape, to minimise complications and increase durability. This study aims to provide an overview of different tipdesigns and compare their performance, complications and patency rates.

Methods

A comprehensive literature review was performed identifying studies published before September 2023 (last 20 years) in MEDLINE, Embase and Google Scholar databases with relevant medical subject headings and search terms such as hemodialysis, vascular access and catheter design. Studies relating to non-tunneled catheters and studies not in English were excluded. er symmetric-tip and split-tip catheters performed better with regards to thrombosis and recirculation rates respectively.

Results

There were 2 meta-analyses comparing either step-tip, split-tip, and symmetrical-tip designs with one another; eleven randomised controlled trials and fifteen cohort studies were identified comparing outcomes of tunneled haemodialysis catheter designs. Regarding rates of infection, there was no statistically significant difference amongst the three tip-designs studied in the meta-analyses. There was a lower thrombosis rate for symmetric-tip compared to both step and split-tip, but this conclusion was drawn from only two and three studies respectively. Split-tip catheters had lower blood recirculation rates than step-tip. There was no difference patency rates at one, six and twelve months between tip-designs.

Conclusions

This review summarizes current evidence comparing different tunneled haemodialysis catheter designs to help guide catheter choice. Overall, there is not a clear superior catheter design in terms of durability, however symmetric-tip and split-tip catheters performed better with regards to thrombosis and recirculation rates respectively.

Read the full article here: https://issuu.com/bsir/docs/2025_february_newsletter