Experience in anaesthetic management of non-cardiac surgery in patients with ventricular assist devices.

Heart failure (HF) is a syndromic condition with a high incidence in current medicine. When the symptoms of HF progress, and become refractory, cardiac transplant is the best therapeutic option. However, due to the shortage of donors and the long waiting lists, many of those patients are candidates for implantation of ventricular assist devices as a bridge to the cardiac transplant, or when this is not an option, as a definitive therapy.

Red blood cell storage time and transfusion: current practice, concerns and future perspectives.

Red blood cells (RBCs) units are the most requested transfusion product worldwide. Indications for transfusion include symptomatic anaemia, acute sickle cell crisis, and acute blood loss of more than 30% of the blood volume, with the aim of restoring tissue oxygen delivery. However, stored RBCs from donors are not a qualitative equal product, and, in many ways, this is a matter of concern in the transfusion practice.

[Visual extinction: a study by means of potentials evoked with movement].

Introduction: The term extinction refers to the phenomenon in which a patient with a lesion of the central nervous system ignores one of two stimuli in conditions of simultaneous bilateral stimuli. Various studies observe this phenomenon as the expression of a deficit in the process of selective attention, but there are few studies with potentials related to events (PRE).

Objectives: To find the possible electrical correlation of the extinction phenomenon and the stage of processing at which this occurs.