Early gastrointestinal Complications after Pediatric Cardiac Surgery

Abstract

The aim of this study is to evaluation of early gastrointestinal complications after pediatric cardiac surgery. Materials and Methods: This study was retrospectively that performed on all patients who underwent heart surgery in Shahid Madani Hospital in Tabriz between 2017 and 2019 and their files were complete, in which patients were divided into two groups with gastrointestinal complications and without gastrointestinal complications and the effect of various factors such as patient age and weight, aortic clamp duration, ejection fraction and cardiopulmonary bypass in the occurrence of complications was measured. Gastrointestinal complications included peptic ulcer disease, gastropathy, perforation of the stomach or intestine, gastrointestinal bleeding, hepatic failure, intestinal ischemia, pseudomembranous colitis, paralytic ileus, constipation, diarrhea and vomiting. Patients ranged in age from one month to 18 years. The data collection methods was conducted by reviewing patient records. Results: In this study, 82 patients in two groups of 40 patients without gastrointestinal complications and 42 patients with gastrointestinal complications were studied whose the median (25th and 75th percentages) of their ages in these two groups were 1.4 (0.5 - 7.5) and 0.7 (0.3 - 2.2) years, respectively. Also, the median (25th and 75th percentages) height in these two groups were 83.5 (66.0 - 124.3) and 66.0 (55.5 - 89.5) cm, respectively. The median (25th and 75th percentile) weight in these two groups was 10.4 (6.4 - 28.0) and 6.5 (4.2 - 10.3) kg, respectively. Among the underlying variables, the variables of age, height and weight in the group without gastrointestinal complications were significantly higher than the group with gastrointestinal complications (P <0.05). In this study, among the types of gastrointestinal complications, diarrhea, postoperative ileus and gastrointestinal bleeding (GIB) with 12 cases (28.6%), 10 cases (23.8%) and 8 cases (19.0), respectively were the most common in the group with gastrointestinal complications studied. Among all the variables related to heart surgery in the studied patients, none of them including length of hospital stay, number of readmissions, duration of anesthesia, aortic clamp duration, cardiopulmonary bypass and ejection fraction were not statistically significant difference between the two groups with and without gastrointestinal complications (P <0.05).