Does cardioplegia leave room for postconditioning in paediatric cardiac surgery?
GROUND: Postconditioning by brief episodes of ischaemia performed just at the time of reperfusion have been shown to reduce the size of infarcts in animal models, and in the clinical setting of percutaneous cardiac intervention. The clinical applicability of postconditioning in cardiac surgery remains to be determined. We investigated the effect of postconditioning on myocardial protection in children undergoing cardiac surgery. METHODS: We randomly assigned 40 patients scheduled for surgical correction of congenitally malformed hearts under cold blood cardioplegic arrest to postconditioning or control treatment. Postconditioning was performed by two cycles of 30 seconds ischaemia and 30 seconds reperfusion using aortic reclamping, and declamping started 30 seconds after cardioplegic arrest. We assayed creatine kinase-MB, troponin I, transcardiac release of lactate and neutrophil counts. RESULTS: The types of procedure, age, bypass and aortic cross-clamping times were similar in both g
