Society of Toxicology: Safety Assessment of Radiofrequency Renal Denervation in Swine

Keating JH, Stanley JRL, Tzafriri AR, Spognardi AM, Markham PM, Edelman ER. ‘Safety Assessment of Radiofrequency Renal Denervation in Swine.’

Summary: Radiofrequency (RF) renal denervation (RDN) is a novel catheter based treatment option for patients with refractory hypertension, wherein energy is delivered at the renal artery wall lumen by a single or multiple RF electrodes. Efficacious reductions in blood pressure (BP) are associated with inhibition of sympathetic signaling and require the delivery of sufficient RF energy to functionally transect efferent and afferent nerves. Variable clinical results have been correlated with shallow energy penetration, as demonstrated in postmortem histopathologic sections. Thus, RF ablation zones must be sufficiently deep and extensive to allow for effective nerve disruption, while minimizing adverse effects on treated vessels (e.g., thrombosis, excessive neointima formation or arterial wall injury) and on regional tissues such as adventitial soft tissue and vasculature, skeletal muscle, adrenal glands and ureters.

Poster presented at: Society of Toxicology (SOT); 2016 Mar 13-17; New Orleans, LA.