Early cardiac surgical treatment of infants with ventricular septal defect complicated with pulmonary hypertension

Objective To analyze the surgical outcome of 460 infants with VSD complicated with PH, to investigate the feasibility and advantage of early open-heart surgery. Methods Four hundred and sixty infants with VSD and PH underwent extracorporeal circulation open -heart surgery from Jan 2003 to Mar 2009 in our hospital. Among which, there were 132 little infants(younger than 6 months)and 328 big infants (older than 6 months). Results Sixteen of all patients died, and the overall in- hospital mortality was 3.4%. The mortality of little infants group and big infants group were 4.5% (6 cases died)and 3.0% (10 cases died)respectively. Other complications were low cardiac output, pneumonia, atelectasis, arrhythmia, wound infection and so on, and they were cured. There were no significant differences in operation time, extracorporeal circulation time, duration of postoperative respiratory machine assisted ventilation, postoperative monitoring duration, postoperative hospitalization duration and mortality rate between the two groups. Conclusions The effect of early cardiac surgical treatment on infants with VSD and PH is well accepted. Early cardiac surgical treatment can avoid reiteration of pneumonia, and it can also avoid blowing the operation chance because of the happening of organic pulmonary hypertension. Key words: Infant ;  Ventricular septal defect ;  Pulmonary hypertension ;  Open-heart surgery ;