What is Beating Heart Surgery?
Beating heart surgery most commonly refers to coronary artery bypass graft
surgery performed on the beating heart. Standard coronary artery bypass
surgery is performed by "arresting" the heart and supporting the vital
organs of the body by pumping oxygenated blood from the heart-lung machine
into the patient. With an ever aging population, an old technique described
first by the Russian surgeon Kolessov was "reinvented" and popularized in
the United States in the 1990's. The technique avoids the use of the
heart-lung machine and its known deleterious effects, namely stroke and
other end-organ dysfunction. These deleterious effects are more likely in
the elderly, hence the impetus to use the beating heart technique in high
risk patients. More recently, several large studies from respected
institutions around the world have demonstrated that beating heart coronary
artery bypass surgery is equally efficacious in the low-risk patient, that
is patients who have disease limited only to the heart.
In beating heart surgery, the heart is allowed to beat and bypass grafts are
constructed without support of the heart-lung machine. A very large body of
literature exists about the benefits of beating heart coronary artery bypass
graft surgery. The aim of this section is to keep both patients and
practicing surgeons updated on the latest techniques and outcome studies in
beating heart coronary artery bypass surgery, also known as "off-pump"
coronary artery bypass surgery.
