Follow-up for postoperative congenital cardiac cases

Abstract EN

Background: The advances in both palliative and corrective surgery in the last twenty years, lead to dramatic increase of the number of children with CHD surviving to adulthood.

Aims: To study incidence of various post-cardiac surgery complications and to assess the outcome of different cardiac surgical procedures.

Methods: Two hundred consecutive postoperative cases attending the post cardiac surgical outpatient clinic from March 2006 to March 2007 were included.

Cases were classified according to surgical procedures into palliative cardiac operations including 26 cases (13%) and corrective cardiac operations including 174 cases (87%).

For all cases the followings were done: full history taking, clinical examination, chest X-ray, standard 12 leads ECG, routine laboratory studies and color Doppler echocardiography.

Statistical package for social science (SPSS) version 9.0 was used for analysis of data.

Results: Thirteen percent of cases were below the 5th percentile for weight and 18% of cases were below 5* percentile for height in the first visit .Weight gain and increase in height were evident in both palliative and corrective surgical cases .

Postoperative echocardiography of the studied groups revealed improvement in 100% of cases with chamber enlargement in both groups, 75% of cases with mitral regurge and 85% of cases with restrictive physiology of the right ventricle in corrective group.

Residual shunt was found in 19%of cases and heart failure in 10.5% ,while anemia was in 16% of cases.

Conclusion: corrective cardiac surgery was conducted on most of cases of the studied group.

Patients with defect lesion were operated upon at earlier age than those with congenital cyanotic heart diseases.

Growth in child ren with CHD is often compromised and surgical correction results in catch up of growth for about half of the cases.