Post-infarction ventricular septal defect surgery in Portugal

Introduction and Objective: We performed a collective analysis of a dedicated national post -myocardial infarction ventricular septal defect (VSD) registry to further elucidate controversial areas of this clinical entity's surgical treatment.Methods: A descriptive statistical analysis was carried out and cumulative survival using the Kaplan-Meier method and multivariate logistic regression of risk factors for 30-day mortality are presented.Results: Median survival of the cohort (n=76) was 72 months (95% CI 4--144 months). Better cumulative survival was observed in patients who underwent VSD closure more than 10 days after myocardial infarction (log-rank p=0.036). Concomitant coronary artery bypass grafting (CABG), different closure techniques, location of the VSD, extracorporeal membrane oxygena-tion as bridge to closure, or intra-aortic balloon pump as bridge to closure showed no statistically significant differences at Kaplan-Meier analysis. Multivariate binary logistic regression for inde-pendent factors affecting status at 30 days showed a statistically significant effect of age (OR 1.08; 95% CI 1.01-1.15) and concomitant CABG (OR 0.23; 95% CI 0.06-0.90).Conclusions: Our results are comparable with previous reports regarding mortality, risk factors and concomitant procedures. Timing of surgery remains a controversial issue. Later closure seems to be advantageous, however, there is significant observational bias. & COPY; 2023 Sociedade Portuguesa de Cardiologia. Published by Elsevier Espan & SIM;a, 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/).