How Is The Neonatal Cardiac Surgery In A Spanish Center?: A Review Of The Last 5 Years

Introduction and objectives: The results of neonatal surgery have improved in recent decades, even the most complex. Dedicated groups could help in centres with low activity. We analysed the neonatal surgery outcomes of our centre in the last 5 years.Methods: All neonatal patients operated during the period between 2015 and 2019, were collected excluding patients with patent ductus arteriosus and extracorporeal membrane oxygenation.Results: A total of 134 patients underwent surgery with a predominance of extracorporeal circulation (65.7%). The transposition of the great arteries (n = 32) and coarctation (n = 27) were the most frequent pathologies. Patients with cardiopulmonary bypass presented more surgical difficulty (10 vs. 8, P < 0.001), prolonged extubation time (3 vs. 1, P < 0.001) and intensive care unit length of stay (11 vs. 8, P = 0.003), as well as higher mortality at 30 days and in hospital (7.9% vs. 0%, P = 0.049; 10.2 vs. 0%, P = 0.03). Those operated without cardiopulmonary bypass had a higher percentage of underweight patients (10.2 vs. 21.7, P = 0.05) and prematurity (7.9% vs. 21.7%, P = 0.03), with a predominance of palliative procedures. Overall mortality at 30 days and hospital mortality was 5.2 and 6.7% respectively, with a decrease compared with the previous period (4.8 and 11.1%).Conclusions: Low-activity national centres can obtain results comparable to other European centres due to highly cohesive multidisciplinary teams. (c) 2020 Sociedad Espanola de Cirugia Cardiovascular y Endovascular. Published by Elsevier Espana, S.L.U. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).