Original articleAdult cardiacCardiac Surgery in Jehovah's Witness Patients: Ten-Year Experience
Section snippets
Patients
From May 2000 to April 2010, 94 JW patients underwent cardiac surgery at PAH. Of these, data were unavailable for 2 patients. One patient consented to and received blood products, and was excluded from this study. Data for the remaining 91 patients were collected from the hospital cardiac surgery database.
Bloodless Medicine Program at PAH
The Center of Bloodless Medicine and Surgery at PAH receives approximately 1,000 outpatient visits per year. The JW patients comprise approximately 95% of these visits. The “bloodless medicine
Preoperative Risk Factors
Preoperative demographics and comorbidities are depicted in Table 1. Fifty-five patients (60.4%) were able to be optimized as outpatients, and 36 were admitted to the hospital preoperatively (mean preoperative length of stay 14.6 ± 18.3 days, median 6.5). The goal of preadmission of these patients was optimization of Hb level in the presence of additional factors that deemed it unsafe to discharge them while waiting for Hb to increase. For example, 1 patient was admitted for 42 days for
Comment
Jehovah's Witness patients present a unique challenge to cardiac surgeons owing to their religious beliefs. Some surgeons may hesitate in providing requisite care to these patients because of these considerations, and because of the legal and ethical questions that may arise. In this study, we examine our outcomes for, often complex, cardiac surgical interventions in JW patients. We performed a variety of cardiac surgical procedures in this population. Ten patient (11.1%) required a redo
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