Long-Term Outcome Evaluation in Patient Undergoing Deep Hypothermic Circulatory Arrest in Aortic Arch Surgery

Background: Aortic dissection is usually associated with low survival rates due to high prehospital and perioperative mortality, in addition with increased risk of postoperative complication in survivals. Since 1985, deep hypothermic circulatory arrest (DHCA) is often used in aortic arch surgery with main advantage to provide bloodless surgical field while protecting brain tissue during hypothermia. Nevertheless, it still raises concern of increasing neurologic sequelae and a potential decrease of long-term quality of life. The aim of study: To evaluate the effect of DHCA used in aortic surgery on long-term quality of life. Methods: In this observational case series we included a total of 24 patients who had aortic arch surgery requiring DHCA in the Pauls Stradins Clinical University Hospital Cardiac Surgery center, from January 2019 to December 2020. Seven patients were excluded due to intrahospital death. For the rest of the patients Quality of life (QOL) was evaluated using RAND SF36 questionnaire and MMSE test. Data regarding demographics, clinical characteristics, surgery type, duration of circulatory arrest, rectal and bladder temperatures were collected and analyzed using the SPSS 23 Statistics software IBM SPSS Statistics 21 (IBM Corporation, NY, USA). Statistical significance was assumed as two- tailed p