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Angiography

A type of X-ray used to analyze blood vessels is angiography.

A special dye gets injected into your blood first to highlight your blood vessels, allowing your doctor to notice any problems.

The X-ray images obtained during angiography are called angiograms. 

Usage 

Angiography helps check your blood vessels’ health and blood flow. It assists in diagnosing several problems affecting blood vessels, including:

  • Atherosclerosis – narrowing of the arteries, meaning you’re at risk of heart attack or stroke
  • Peripheral arterial disease – decreased blood flow to the leg muscles
  • A brain aneurysm – a lump in a blood vessel in the brain
  • Angina – reduced blood flow to the heart muscles, causing chest pain
  • Blood clots – a blockage in the artery supplying the lungs and kidneys

Types

There are different types of angiography, depending on the part of the body.

Common types include checking:

  • Cerebral angiography – blood vessels in and around the brain
  • Coronary angiography – heart and nearby blood vessels
  • Pulmonary angiography – blood vessels supplying the lungs
  • Renal angiography – blood vessels supplying the kidneys

Occasionally, angiography might use scans instead of X-rays, like CT angiography or MRI angiography.

Angiography

Procedure

Angiography happens in a hospital’s X-ray or radiology department.

For the test:

  • You’ll usually be conscious, but a medicine called a sedative helps you to relax.
  • On an X-ray table, you lie, and an incision happens over one of your arteries, usually near the wrist or groin, by a local anesthetic to numb the area of the cut.
  • A thin, flexible tube (catheter) gets inserted into the artery.
  • A dye (contrast medium) is flown into the catheter to obtain a series of X-rays as the dye flows through your blood vessels.

The completion can take between thirty minutes and two hours. You can usually go home a few hours afterward.

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Reviewed by – Dr. Priyanka, MBBS MD
Page last reviewed: 04 October 2022