Articles: postoperative-complications.
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This report presents a case of penetrating chest trauma leading to pericardial tamponade and ventricular septum defect successfully resuscitated by surgery in 1968 in an 11-year-old boy. 10 years later a first-size calcified hematoma was removed. However the 30% left to right intracardiac shunt flow as established by complete heart catheterization prior to surgery was not corrected. Non-invasive methods were used to assess cardiac function 18 years after the initial event including physical examination, chest X-ray, thoracic computer tomography, ECG, 24 h Holter monitoring and exercise testing, combined with myocardial scintigraphy and radionuclide angiography and echocardiographic techniques using the transthoracic and the transoesophageal approach. The diagnostic value of echocardiographic examinations is emphasized with special reference to contrast- and Doppler-echocardiography including the color-coded Doppler-flow-imaging technique.
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Cahiers d'anesthésiologie · Nov 1986
Randomized Controlled Trial Comparative Study Clinical Trial[Preventive antibiotics in cardiac surgery: cefazolin versus cefamandole].
A prospective, randomized study was carried out to evaluate two antibiotic prophylactic regimens for patients undergoing cardiac surgery with cardiopulmonary bypass. Each patient of the first group (cefazolin) received four intravenous injections of 1 g cefazolin during 12 hours, patients of second (cefamandole), four doses of 750 mg. 155 patients scheduled for cardiac operation were included in the study. (May 1983 to April 1984). Patients were not admitted to the study in case of emergency, if their weight was less than 20 kg, if they had received antibiotics during the week before surgery or if they had a history of anaphylactic reactions to cephalosporins. ⋯ Hospital stay was the similar in the two groups. The two antibiotics are similarly effective to prevent major infections in cardiac surgery. However cefazolin was preferred for antibiotic prophylaxis in cardiac surgery because of the higher rate of streptococcal urinary infections in patients given cefamandole.
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Pulmonary complications following orthotopic liver transplantation (OLT) were prospectively evaluated in 18 individuals transplanted at the New England Deaconess Hospital. Of sixteen patients who survived the immediate postoperative period, 12 (75%) sustained a pulmonary complication. Of these complications, 64% were noninfectious--whereas 22% were infectious, and 14% probably infectious. ⋯ Unlike noninfectious complications, pulmonary infections were associated with a fatal outcome in five of six patients who died after OLT. Pulmonary complications are frequent and serious occurrences after OLT, and contribute to both the morbidity and mortality of this procedure. Compared with pulmonary complications seen after transplantation of other organs, OLT was associated with a higher proportion of noninfectious complications but a similar spectrum of pulmonary infections.
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Case Reports
Cardiac assessment for patients undergoing noncardiac surgery. A multifactorial clinical risk index.
In this article, we describe a multifactorial cardiac risk index that can be used to assess patients undergoing noncardiac surgery. The index is a modified version of an index that was previously generated by Goldman and coworkers on a set of 1001 consecutive patients and prospectively validated in our clinical setting (a general medical consultation service in a large teaching hospital) on 455 patients. We present a Bayesian approach to assessing cardiac risks by converting average risks for patients undergoing particular surgical procedures (pretest probabilities) to average risks for patients with each index score (posttest probabilities). A simple nomogram is presented for performing such a calculation.