الفهرس 
ANATOMY OF THE RADIAL ARTERYOnly 14 pages are availabe for public view
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Abstract
Coronary artery disease remains the major cause of mortality worldwide. Despite aggressive application of percutaneous coronary interventions, the surgical approach, namely coronary artery bypass grafting (CABG), remains a major approach for the treatment of coronary artery disease.
Since the revival of RA grafting by Acar and colleagues in 1992, many groups published encouraging results and the RA has become one of the most commonly used graft next to the mammary artery. The RA harvesting technique used in these studies was the traditional open technique. Using the open radial artery harvesting method described by Reyes and colleagues, many patients undergoing coronary artery bypass grafting expressed either dissatisfaction with the cosmetic result (particularly in women), hypersensitivity of the forearm scar, or parasthesias or numbness to the hand. Although forearm wound infections were infrequent, patients, particularly those with diabetes mellitus, commonly had scabbing, cellulitis, or incisional separation. from our experience of open radial artery harvest, we believe these complications may be underreported in the literature.
ERAH was first described by Terada and colleagues in 1998. Many authors described their own techniques and developed technology for ERAH.
Quality of the harvested RAs in both techniques was almost the same; also the patency rates were the encouraging. Moreover, surgeons preferred ERAH due its infrequent complication as regards the wound, neurological and scar formation. Patients preferred ERAH due to its better cosmetic results, less effect on hand power, less disability due to scar formation and also less residual parathesia.
We described in our essay the benefit of ERAH and why it is preferred by many surgeons and also patients over the traditional open method. But this technique, as we formerly mentioned, requires good training. So, we recommend mastering of the procedure before attempting to perform it not to lose credits due to personal variations.
Finally we recommend further adoption of ERAH and follow up of the results to view the long term results of ERAH.