“What is cardiac catheterization?”

Cardiac catheterization is a procedure that is performed to assess coronary artery blockages. Catheterization is done by passing catheters to the heart and injecting dye and take video pictures of the heart arteries. It is a simple procedure and has less than 5% risk. If catheterization shows blockages, then additional procedure may be required to fix the blockages that can be more risky.

Cardiac catheterization or coronary angiography is a procedure that involves placing a catheter through an artery in either the radial artery or femoral artery and passing it through the arteries back to the heart. The catheter is then placed into the coronary arteries and a contrast agent is then passed into the arteries so the lumen of the coronary arteries can be visualized to see if a stent or bypass is needed. I can't speak for your cardiologist but in general this is a very safe procedure and patients are comfortable throughout the procedure.

Another common name for this is an angiogram. The basic heart cath involves inserting a catheter (small tube) through a blood vessel in the groin or wrist, and threading it up to the heart. Contrast (commonly called dye) is injected into the heart arteries to make them show up on an xray movie. This is to look for narrowing in the arteries (blockage) which may lead to a heart attack. Severe blockage can often be treated at the same time by placing a stent. The catheterization also gives information about the strength of the heart muscle and valve function.

Best to look at this: https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/coronary-angiography/

It's generally very safe and almost painless (just a little numbing injection to start with).

It is a minimally invasive and very commonly used procedure (not considered a surgery) and performed in the Cath Lab. Using local anesthesia and moderate sedation, a small catheter (sterile plastic tube) is placed in the superficial artery in either the wrist or the groin and, using the X-ray, threaded carefully backwards into the heart and the arteries of the heart (coronary arteries - there are normally 3 arteries). A small amount of dye that is visible on X-ray is injected into each artery in different views of the X-ray camera to make a high resolution video of each artery and the percentage of blockage it may have (generally over 70% is significant and 99% is critical). The videos are analyzed immediately and a decision is made to proceed with the next step to try and open the artery and restore blood flow, which are either angioplasty (using balloon or stent) or cardiac surgery instead. The procedure is generally very safe with most non-urgent elective cardiac Cath having a risk of 1% of all complications. The commonest is bleeding from the entry point (though obviously much less from the wrist access), the risk of the X-ray dye affecting the kidney (of importance only if the kidney function is abnormal before the test), and, very unlikely and rare, occurrence of a stroke or heart attack during the procedure (but blood thinners are given continuously during the test to prevent these two rare complications).