On the future of adult cardiac surgery.

Considerable uncertainty exists about the role that will be played by cardiac surgery for acquired heart disease in the coming decade. In many institutions the volume of surgery for ischemic heart disease has already been affected by advances in interventional cardiology; the impact of those advances can only increase with the inexorable advance of technology. Percutaneous catheter intervention for valvular heart disease is also being pursued aggressively.

Bloodless cannulation of the ascending aorta.

Bloodless cannulation of the aorta can be accomplished easily. A full thickness stab wound prior to insertion of the cannula is unnecessary as the aorta's inner layers have little strength.

Randomised trials of new procedures: problems and pitfalls.

Randomised trials that compare new procedures with established ones must avoid prerandomisation bias and must allocate patients to treatment groups based on objective or quantitative criteria, not on subjective clinical judgment. Risk, length of follow up, and sample size must be used to calculate the statistical power of the study, so that a significant difference between treatments does not remain undetected (a type II error). There should already be sufficient experience with the new procedure so that complication rates have stabilised, and participating operators are equally comfortable with all procedures being studied.

Maximal utilization of the left internal mammary artery for coronary bypass grafting.

A technique is described for using the internal mammary artery to bypass the left anterior descending coronary artery and another adjacent coronary artery even when the alignment of the two vessels is not favorable for a conventional sequential graft. The distal end of the mammary artery is amputated and used to construct a Y graft to the anterior descending artery and to the secondary target vessel.

Cox/maze procedure for atrial septal defect with atrial fibrillation: management strategies.

Atrial fibrillation is found at late follow-up in approximately half of all adults who have had correction of atrial septal defect, even if it was not present preoperatively. These patients are thus exposed to the risks of stroke and chronic drug therapy even after a successful operation. Simultaneous surgical correction of atrial septal defect and atrial fibrillation was accomplished in a 52-year-old man by means of the Cox/maze procedure.