Red Hot Tips Point: Benefits and risks of open heart surgery

Sunday, June 28, 2009

The ideal result of an open-heart surgery is the correction of a congenital defect, repair/replacement of a defective valve or bypass of a blocked artery with no further surgery necessary. However, every patient is unique and some conditions require follow-up procedures. In the case of the coronary artery bypass graft, for instance, a second surgery is usually not needed unless the artery re-narrows (restenosis) or closes altogether, which happens in 5 to 20 percent of patients. Changes in the patient’s lifestyle can be an important factor in determining whether another operation is necessary.

Although modern open-heart surgery has become a fairly common procedure, with a high overall survival rate, it does carry a risk of complications. This risk tends to be higher in older people and/or those with other serious medical conditions prior to the surgery. About 5 to 10 percent of patients experience strokes or transient ischemic attacks either during or shortly after open-heart surgery. Other complications include bleeding and infection.

Conventional open-heart surgery, which has been around for almost 50 years, requires the use of the heart-lung machine to take over the heart’s functions during surgery so that the heart can be carefully stopped and worked on.