Long-Term Out come Evaluation in Patient Undergoing Deep Hypo-thermic Circulatory Arrest in Aortic Arch Surgery

Abstract

Background: Aortic dissection is usually associated with low survival rates due to high prehospital and perioperative mortality, in addition with increased risk of postoperative complication in survivals. Since 1985, deep hypothermic circulatory arrest (DHCA) is often used in aortic arch surgery with main advantage to provide bloodless surgical field while protecting brain tissue during hypothermia. Nevertheless, it still raises concern of increasing neurologic sequelae and a potential decrease of long-term quality of life. The aim of study: To evaluate the effect of DHCA used in aortic surgery on long-term quality of life. Methods: In this observational case series we included a total of 24 patients who had aortic arch surgery requiring DHCA in the Pauls Stradins Clinical University Hospital Cardiac Surgery center, from January 2019 to December 2020. Seven patients were excluded due to intrahospital death. For the rest of the patients Quality of life (QOL) was evaluated using RAND SF36 questionnaire and MMSE test. Data regarding demographics, clinical characteristics, surgery type, duration of circulatory arrest, rectal and bladder temperatures were collected and analyzed using the SPSS 23 Statistics software IBM SPSS Statistics 21 (IBM Corporation, NY, USA). Statistical significance was assumed as two- tailed p <0.05. Results: A total of 17 patients were analyzed, we had 12 (71%) males and 5 (29%) females. A mean age was 60.71 (±13.8 SD) years, leading co-morbidity was hypertension – 11 (64.7%). There were 6 (35.3%) elective and 11 (64.7%) acute surgeries. Stan-ford A dissection (82.4%) constituted the main part of all cases. A 94.7% had aortic arch replacement. Most common postopera-tive complication was wound infection- 29.4%. The mean cardiopulmonary bypass time, aortic cross-clamping and reperfusion time was 212 (±38.3, SD), 124 (±33.8, SD) and 70.2 (±32.9, SD) minutes, respectively. Core temperature during DHCA was 23.2 Cº (±3.2, SD) and a rewarming rate was 0.12 (±0.07, SD) Cº/min. No significance correlation between RAND SF36 questionnaire score (QoL questionnaire) and lowest DHCA temperature, aortic cross - clamping, reperfusion time, CPB time was observed, respectively - p=0.367, p=0.544, p=0.619, p=0. We found statistically significant moderate strength correlation between QOL and rewarming rate (r=0.550; p=0.022). Mean RAND SF36 questionnaire score was 71.9±10. and mean MMSE score was 27.9±5,3. Conclusions: We found no correlation between quality of life and lowest temperature during surgery, aortic cross- clamping time, reperfusion time, however we found positive moderate strength correlation between rewarming rate and quality of life. Patient quality of life after surviving aortic arch surgery and deep hypothermic circulatory arrest compared to general healthy population quality of life is slightly reduced. Mini-mental state exam and RANDO short form health survey can be useful scoring system to evaluate patient quality of life.