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| The Monthly Pulse |
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| 5 Step-by-Step Cardiac Procedures to Strengthen Your Skills
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| The Story |
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| Cardiovascular surgery encompasses a broad range of procedures and skills. Having a step-by-step guide to reference for both simple and complex skills can help provide a refresher for popular procedures. Recently, CTSNet put together a list of five step-by-step guides to help surgeons strengthen their skills. |
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| What You Should Know |
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| From the increasingly popular minimally invasive CABG procedure to commando procedure used in aortic and mitral valve replacement, this roundup of videos and articles offers walkthroughs that are both straightforward and informative. Other easy-to-follow guides are provided for a subxiphoid pericardial window, a minimally invasive mitral valve repair, and robotic assisted single vessel coronary artery bypass graft surgery.
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| Analysis Shows No Long-Term Mortality Difference in CABG With Radial Artery Vs. Saphenous Vein Grafts
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| The Story |
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| A common question within cardiothoracic surgery has been whether radial artery (RA) grafts outperform saphenous vein (grafts) when it comes to long-term survival for patients undergoing coronary artery bypass grafting (CABG). Recently, cardiothoracic surgeons set out to answer this question with a research letter published in Circulation. According to a post hoc analysis of a clinical study that compared the two graft types, mortality outcomes are similar among both.
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| What You Should Know |
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| The recently published analysis confirmed what many cardiothoracic surgeons have long suspected: using a radial artery graft over a saphenous graft is unlikely to influence survival. Median survival rates were similar among the patient populations compared: 14.6 years for those who received an SV graft versus 14.2 years for those who received the RA graft. Authors of the research letter therefore emphasize that surgeons should continue to use the method that delivers the best results for them.
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| Aortic root replacement in severe left ventricular dysfunction: The added value of beating-heart surgery |
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| The Story |
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| Cardiovascular surgery involving the aorta and cardiac valves is typically performed during cardioplegic arrest. Yet, there are limits to this approach, including the ability to preserve postoperative cardiac function. Recently, an alternate technique was assessed in the Journal of Cardiac Surgery: using support of cardiopulmonary bypass (CPB) to perform beating-heart bypass surgery, thereby preserving cardiac function while still allowing surgeons to perform a complex procedure. |
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| What You Should Know |
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| While beating-heart bypass surgery is a known alternative to CABG using cardioplegic arrest, it is seldom used for intracardiac surgery. Yet, there are benefits to using this approach in more complex procedures, including improved physiological conditions and the avoidance of ischemia-reperfusion injury. With that in mind, beating-heart surgery calls for special considerations, including temperature management, coronary perfusion verification and maintenance, and the prevention of air embolisms.
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| Leadership Reflections |
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Habits
I love Gretchen Rubin’s book, Better than Before: What I Learned about Making and Breaking Habits - To Sleep More, Quit Sugar, Procrastinate Less, and Generally Build a Happier Life. The new year seems to bring a renewed desire to work at personal habits, and Gretchen has some great strategies:
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- Scheduling - setting a specific, regular time for an activity to recur
- First Steps - when we’re ready to begin, the best time is now
- The Lightening Bolt - sometimes we need to be smacked with a new idea that jolts us into change
- Monitoring - once we recognize what we’re doing, we may choose to behave differently
- Loophole Spotting - if we stay on the lookout, we can perhaps avoid pitfalls that prevent us from maintaining positive habits
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While these are outstanding strategies for personal habit development and change, we can also consider them from a leadership perspective. How can we as leaders model these strategies? And, can we work with our teams to implement them into daily behaviors to help individuals meet key performance indicators, and ultimately, our shared team goals? If you’re interested in personal or team habit changes, this book is worth the read.
Wishing you all a happy, healthy, and productive 2023! |
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| Upcoming Events |
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| CT Assist will be sponsoring/exhibiting at the STS 58th Annual Meeting, January 29-30. If you're attending please stop by table #1141, we'd love to see you! |
| 7th Annual Advances in Congenital Heart Disease Summit: Transposition of the Great Arteries |
| Thurs., Feb. 16 to Sat., Feb. 18 |
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| 15th annual Mid-Atlantic VAD and ECMO Symposium (MAVES) |
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| Sanibel Symposium |
| Wed. May 10 - Sat. May 13 |
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| Hoosier Extracorporeal Science Conference |
| Fri. May 26 - Sat. May 27 |
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| AACN NTI 2023 |
| Mon., May 22 - Wed., May 24 |
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