Four Years ’ Experience With a Miniaturized Extracorporeal Circulation System and Its Influence on Clinical Outcome

Abstract

It has been suggested that the morbidity associ-ated with cardiopulmonary bypass can be attributed in part to the blood–material and blood–air interactions in the extracorporeal circulation (ECC). A recently introduced minimized ECC-system (MECC System) should be able to reduce these negative effects associated with ECC. A ret-rospective analysis was performed comprising 485 patients who were operated on for elective coronary artery bypass grafting (CABG) using the MECC System with intermit-tent antegrade warm blood cardioplegia (group 1) from January 2000 to February 2004. A control group consisted of 485 patients (group 2) undergoing elective CABG in the same period using a conventional ECC and cold crystalloid cardioplegia. There were no significant differences between the two groups in terms of the duration of intu