DOI: https://doi.org/10.36347/sasjs.2025.v11i01.001

Pages: 1-5

Cardioplegia is an integral component of myocardial protection. Standard delivery of cardioplegia includes antegrade and retrograde method. Retrograde technique may cause injury to the coronary sinus and inadequate right ventricular protection while antegrade alone may be inadequate especially delivery of cardioplegia through very stenotic vessels. Therefore, in this study we compare myocardial protection using antegrade cardioplegia alone compared to combination of antegrade and vein cardioplegia in on pump coronary artery bypass graft surgery. This is a cross sectional retrospective study. Two groups of patients (antegrade combined with vein cardioplegia-study group and antegrade cardioplegia alone- control group) were studied. The study group consists of 42 patients while the control group consists of 39 patients. Study population are patients aged between 30-80 years old between 1 January 2019 and 30 April 2023. Intraoperative characteristics such as cardiopulmonary bypass time, aortic cross clamp time, cardioplegia volume, number of post-operative inotropes, ventricular tachycardia and fibrillation after aortic unclamping and postoperative characteristics such as hospital stay, ICU stay, mortality, intra-aortic balloon pump insertion, chest reopen for bleeding and postoperative atrial fibrillation were compared. The results of this study showed that cardiopulmonary bypass time, hospital stay, mortality, postoperative IABP insertion and postoperative arrhythmia rate for both groups were similar, however not statistically significant. The study group required less inotropes before transfer to ICU. (2.83 VS 3.10, P=0.04). The primary finding of this study shows that there is no difference in terms of myocardial protection with antegrade combined with vein cardioplegia as compared antegrade cardioplegia alone.