Brandon M Zingale

In recognition of February as American Heart Awareness month, Transonic is pleased to share this blog heart blog along with an offer for a free Transonic Flowprobe. Inspired by the life of Ethan M. Lindberg, first-born son of Jessica and Erik Lindberg, the Ethan M. Lindberg Foundation works for collaborative approaches to medical and patient care that impact children with congenital heart disease (CHD) and their families. The foundation’s mission is to empower families and doctors to work together in creating care plans and strategies that are tailored to each child’s need. Keenly aware of the financial burdens encountered by families of children with CHD, the Foundation offers practical family support by offering grants for temporary housing and providing long-term housing solutions for families with lengthy hospital stays.

The European Task Force on myocardial revascularization of the European Society of Cardiology (ESC) and European Association for Cardio-Thoracic Surgery (EACTS), with the special contribution of the European Association for Percutaneous Cardiovascular Interventions (EAPCI), developed the The 2018 ESC/EACTS Guidelines on Myocardial Revascularization to provide a comprehensive roadmap to assist physicians in selecting the best management strategies for an individual patient with a given condition. Besides continuous ECG monitoring and transoesophageal echocardiography immediately after revascularization, intraoperative quality control may also include graft flow measurement to confirm or exclude a technical graft problem.2 Transit-time flow measurement is the most frequently used technique for graft assessment and has been able to detect that 2-4% of grafts require revision. Some studies even suggest that quality measures during coronary artery bypass grafting (CABG), such as graft flow verification with transit-time ultrasound, are more important than simply the volume of surgeries performed by a center.7,8 “ Clinical value of intra-operative transit-time flow measurement for coronary artery bypass grafting: A prospective angiography-controlled study,” Eur J Cardiothorac Surg.

The 2018 European Guidelines for Myocardial Revascularization suggest that patients should take note of the number of coronary artery bypass grafting (CABG) surgeries performed by a medical center before undergoing CABG at a particular center. The Guidelines point to studies that suggest that the volume of CABG surgeries performed in a hospital significantly impacts outcomes including in-hospital mortality.1,2 An increase in mortality observed in lower volume centers seems to be attributable to so-called `failure to rescue’: although patients operated on at low-volume centers are not at particularly higher risk of suffering a major complication, they are more likely to die from such a complication should it occur. Kim LK, Looser P, Feldman DN, “Peri- and postoperative care after coronary artery bypass grafting in low versus high volume centers,” J Thorac Cardiovasc Surg.

Mended Hearts (www.mendedhearts.org) is a national and community-based non-profit organization that has been offering the gift of hope to heart disease patients, their families and caregivers for over sixty-eight years. To inspire hope and improve the quality of life of heart patients and their families through ongoing peer-to-peer support, education, and advocacy”. With more than 265 chapters in North American, Mended Hearts makes more than 230,000 visits each year to provide education, support and hope to all types of heart disease heart disease patients, their families and caregivers. In January 1951 he asked Doris Silliman, one of the first 50 patients to ever have heart surgery, and three other post-surgery heart patients to discuss how they felt following their surgeries.