Cardiac surgery for Jehovah's Witness (JW) patients is considered to be high risk because of patients' refusal to receive blood transfusion. We report a successful mitral valve replacement for recurrent mitral stenosis after OMC with minimally invasive right thoracotomy, without any transfusion of allogeneic blood or blood products. This minimally invasive mitral valve replacement through right...

Management of thoracotomy pain can be difficult, but the benefits of effective pain control are significant. A variety of modalities for treating postoperative pain after thoracotomy are available, including systemic opiates, regional analgesics, and new oral and parenteral agents. This work provides a review of the literature and recommendations for the clinician.

This case is of an 8-year-old child who had a cardiac arrest and an Emergency Department thoracotomy (EDT) following a penetrating fragmentation injury to the chest. The management included damage control resuscitation, recombinant Factor VIIa and a successful emergency department thoracotomy.

Imaged thoracoscopic surgery is a technique utilized to operate on the intrathoracic organs without making a formal thoracotomy incision. Eleven patients underwent lung biopsy with this procedure and each had markedly reduced postoperative pain. Each patient resumed preoperative activity levels within one week of discharge from the hospital. Besides thoracotomy and thoracoscopy, imaged thoracos...

Background Nonthoracotomy-implantable cardioverter/defibrillator (ICD) systems may represent a significant advance in the treatment of patients with life-threatening ventricular arrhythmias, but their merits relative to those of the wellestablished thoracotomy systems remain largely unknown. The objective of this study was to compare the shortand long-term clinical outcomes after attempted ICD ...

Fifty patients undergoing thoracotomy was studied to compare the effects of cryoanalgesia combined with intravenous continuous analgesia (IVCA). Patients were randomized into two groups: IVCA group and IVCA-cryo group. Subjective pain intensity was assessed on a visual analogue scale at rest (VAS-R) and during movement (VAS-M). Analgesic requirements were evaluated over the 7 days following sur...

CONTEXT AND OBJECTIVE Post-thoracotomy pain is a severe and intense pain caused by trauma to ribs, muscles and peripheral nerves. The current study aimed to compare subpleural analgesia (SPA) with thoracic epidural analgesia (TEA) in patients undergoing thoracotomy. DESIGN AND SETTING Randomized study at Ankara Numune Education and Research Hospital, in Turkey. METHODS Thirty patients prese...

Atelectasis can impair arterial oxygenation and decrease lung compliance. However, the effects of atelectasis on endotoxemic lungs during ventilation have not been well studied. We hypothesized that ventilation at low volumes below functional residual capacity (FRC) would accentuate lung injury in lipopolysaccharide (LPS)-pretreated rats. LPS-pretreated rats were ventilated with room air at 85 ...

BACKGROUND Penetrating cardiac injuries are high-risk, high-mortality injuries considering the outcomes. Therefore, it is important to choose the appropriate incision. In general clinical settings, thoracotomy and median sternotomy are choices of incisions to explore the injury. In this study, the results of median sternotomy and thoracotomy in penetrating cardiac injuries were compared. METH...

BACKGROUND A variety of complications occur in patients with pulmonary aspergilloma. The safety and feasibility of a thoracoscopic approach to therapeutic lung resection for pulmonary aspergilloma have not been well evaluated. METHODS The medical records of patients who underwent video-assisted thoracic surgery (VATS) or a thoracotomy for therapeutic resection of pulmonary aspergilloma betwee...