Friday afternoon in Potomac D will see VAM play host to a series of presentations on access for hemodialysis that will offer education on arteriovenous fistulas (AVFs), grafts (AVGs) and maturation—as well as strategies for managing their failure.
The session will be moderated by Maureen Sheehan, MD, of Wake Forest University Medical Center, North Carolina, and Thomas Huber, MD, from the University of Florida in Gainesville, and is titled “Creation and Complications: Current Strategies in Hemodialysis Access.” Split into two sections, the 90-minute program will focus first on access creation, with Vandana Dua Niyyar, MD, President of the American Society of Diagnostic and Interventional Nephrology (ASDIN), offering up an interventional nephrologist’s angle on the creation of dialysis access.
Speaking to VS@VAM, Huber—among those behind the program—said: “The hope was that we could get someone from the outside that could share their perspective. We’ve tasked [Niyyar] with telling us what vascular surgeons need to know from a nephrologist’s perspective.”
Next up will come Theodore Yuo, MD, of the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, who will explore endovascular AVF (endoAVF), before Libby Weaver from the University of Virginia Health System will talk AVG materials and Yana Etkin, MD, Zucker School of Medicine at Hofstra/Northwell, Long Island, New York, will explore access maturation strategies.
Following a 15-minute panel discussion, the second half of the session will get underway with a talk on the management of failing AVGs and AVFs from Jeffrey J. Siracuse, MD, from the Boston School of Medicine in Boston. Management is the name of the game in this whole second sequence of talks—with management of everything from high-flow AV access the focus of Samuel S. Ahn of TCU & UNTHSC School of Medicine, Fort Worth, to the management of access emergencies rounding out the session in a talk from Huber himself.
Detailing his talk, Huber told VS@VAM that he will turn the spotlight on “aneurysms and pseudoaneurysms that are not recognised and treated definitively.”
