Dear Friend,

Chronic total occlusions (CTOs) of coronary arteries represent one of the greatest challenges to interventional cardiologists. Successful CTO revascularization has been strongly associated with improvement of left ventricular function, freedom from angina and less need for future CABG, and in several registries was associated with improved survival.

Recently specific wires and wireing techniques, and novel strategies like the retrograde approach have improved the successes rate in the hands of experts from 50% to about 90%.
In December 2008 “The Euro CTO Club”, a no-profit association, has been officially constituted with the aim of knowledge exchange among the most experienced European interventionalist in the field of CTO, assess new technologies and strategies.

Since 2007 the Club is active in the field of research, teaching, and promotion of percutaneous revascularization of CTO, which in most European countries is still the main indication for referring patients to bypass surgery.

This is the second Annual Meeting of the Euro CTO Club, a selected course limited to 200 interventionalists who are interested to approach CTO in the near future or to increase the expertise in this most complex field of coronary interventions. The course faculty consists of high volume CTO-experts who present a few state of the art lectures and provide 14 very practical and didactic live taped cases as well as vivid discussion with international experts and all attendees.

The Executive Board