"Zahra Jalili, Alireza Rai, Marzieeh Assareh, Ahmad Reza Assareh, Mostafa Bahremand, Mohammad Reza Saidi, Nahid Salehi, Fatemeh Heydarpour
"To determine short-term (in-hospital) outcome and complications of surgical and interventional procedures performed for patients with coarctation of the aorta (CoA) in the age ranging from 5- 25 years. Medical records of 64 patients (48 males and 16 females) with CoA who underwent surgical treatment from March 2002 to March 2012 were reviewed. Surgical operation was done for 26 patients and interventional procedures were done for 18 cases. The data gathered included type of CoA, anatomic type, hospitalization duration and complications occurred during hospitalization such as hypertension, persistent CoA, surgical wound infection and death. Both surgery and interventional procedures restored pre-operative hypertension significantly. The safest method regarding in-hospital complications was balloon angioplasty (1 patient had systemic hypertension after the procedure, 25%) followed by Dacron patch (3 cases had hypertension and one patient had persistent coarctation). However, no significant difference was observed between different surgical and interventional procedures. Pre-operative systolic blood pressure, age group, peak systolic gradient, simple or complex CoA, discrete or segmental CoA had no significant relationship with in-hospital complications/outcome. In conclusion, we suggest considering all aspects of patients with CoA to choose the best surgical treatment. Based on our experience balloon angioplasty and Dacron patch were the safest method with acceptable rate of restoration of blood pressure during in-hospital follow-up period."
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