Original article: cardiovascularCoronary bypass surgery in women: a long-term comparative study of quality of life after bilateral internal mammary artery grafting in men and women
Section snippets
Patient population
The study population consisted of two groups of computer-assisted matched patients. One cohort of 261 constitutes the entire group of women patients from this surgical practice who underwent coronary artery revascularization with bilateral IMA and supplemental vein grafts between January 1972 and October 1994. The other group contained 261 men from the same surgical practice who also underwent isolated bilateral IMA operations during the same time period. This cohort was selected from the total
Hospital morbidity rate
The overall incidence of postoperative morbidity for the two groups was low, with most patients in the female group 82.8% (n = 216) and 82.0% (n = 214) in the male group experiencing no hospital complications.
Respiratory insufficiency included patients who required intubation for more than 48 hours or tracheostomy (or both). Cerebrovascular accident referred to a neurological deficit that remained unresolved and presented for more than 24 hours. Myocardial infarction was defined as a new onset
Comment
Historically, the influence of gender has demonstrated that coronary surgery carries a higher operative mortality and reduced long-term prognosis in women compared with men 2, 4, 5. However, in the present study, a group of women receiving bilateral IMA grafts was compared with a matched cohort of male bilateral IMA patients. No significant difference was found in either operative mortality or morbidity.
Does this infer that the internal mammary graft may overcome the negative impact of female
Acknowledgements
We thank Dr Debra D. Guest and Starbuck Newton for technical assistance in the preparation of this manuscript.
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