Nowadays, the peripheral arterial occlusive disease caused by atherosclerosis is important reason of morbidity. This peripheral insuffiency of circulation effects the quality of life promptly. The peripheral atherosclerotic disease is caused by a systemic process but shows segmenter involvement of the arterial system. The arterial atherosclerotic disease of the lower extremities is also characterized by segmenter femoropopliteal involvement in 50 % of the cases.

In femoropopliteal bypass procedure the most important problem is the maintaince of long term patency of the grafts. At this point, prevention of late graft thrombosis, neointimal and intimal hyperplasia is still most critical key point.

At our center; 119 consecutive patients underwent 133 surgical femoropopliteal bypass prosedures for intermittant claudication from 1992 through 1998. Fifty three patients were eligible for this study. The results of late follow up of 53 patients was obtained by physical examination, colour dupplex sonography, digital substraction angiography or conventional angiography to asses the long term graft patency according to the type of grafts.

After a mean follow up of 21 (±15) months ; the grafts patency was % 65.2 for the reverse safen vein, % 55.5 for the insitu safen vein and % 36.3 for the prosthetic polytetrafluoroethylene grafts.

There was no significant differences in respect to the graft patency between the reverse safen vein and insitu safen vein use ( p:0.195 ). The graft patency was significantly different between the prosthetic grafts and the reverse safen vein grafts ( p:0.034 ). There also was no significant differences in graft patency between below and above knee procedures ( p:0.154 ).

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