Immediate results of surgical myocardial revascularisation in COVID-19 survivors

Abstract

The novel coronavirus infection (COVID-19) is caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus. First registered at the end of December 2019 in Wuhan, China. Due to the high contagiousness of the virus, the infection quickly spread throughout the world, and on March 11, 2020, the World Health Organization announced the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. During the pandemic, the number of cardiac surgeries was sharply reduced due to the repurposing of hospitals to receive and treat patients with COVID-19. Today, however, diseases of the circulatory system remain the leading cause of death in the developed world. At the same time, there are more and more reports of extremely unfavorable outcomes of cardiac surgery in patients with active infection. Unfavorable outcomes were associated with the development of acute respiratory distress syndrome in the early postoperative period and high hospital mortality. Two years after the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, 98 % of the patients had an infection, and today this group of patients is increasingly common in cardiac surgery practice. At the same time, there is evidence that the transferred COVID-19 has long-term adverse effects, including pathological effects on the cardiovascular and respiratory systems. This retrospective study was aimed at studying and analyzing the immediate results of surgical myocardial revascularization, namely coronary artery bypass grafting on a beating heart, in patients with COVID-19 convalescents with coronary heart disease.