Kartik Patel

and 6 more

Objective: Re-exploration after cardiac surgery still remained a troublesome complication. There is still scarcity of data about the effect of re-exploration after off-pump coronary arterial bypass grafting (OPCABG). We here represent our experience of re-exploration following OPCABG. Method: Total 5990 OPCABG were performed at our center, out-off these 132 (2.2%) patients were re-explored in the OR and were included in this study. The medical records of these patients were retrospectively reviewed. Results: The most common cause of re-exploration was bleeding (83.3%) and most common site of bleeding was from graft/anastomosis (53.8%). Mean time to re-exploration was 9.75±8.65 hours. 30-day mortality was 1.41%.On univariate and multiple regression analysis, emergency surgery, preoperative low platelet count, and number of grafts were found to be an independent risk factor for re-exploration. On multiple regression, emergency surgery, euroscoreII, low platelet count, low ejection fraction, re-exploration, time to re-exploration, blood products used, high post-op serum creatinine and bilirubin, were found to be an independent factor (p<0.001) for mortality. On receiver-operating characteristic analysis, optimum cut off for time to re-exploration was 14 hours with sensitivity 81.3%, specificity of 80% and area under curve of 0.798. Patients who re-explored late (>14 hour) had significantly high mortality (30.55%vs7.3%) and morbidity. Conclusion: Delaying the re-exploration is associated with three-fold increase in mortality and morbidity. So strategy of minimizing the incidence of re-exploration like use of minimally invasive surgery and early re-exploration with judicial use of products should be use to improve outcome after re-exploration following off-pump CABG.