[Reconstructive vascular surgery with long-term refrigerated homografts].

In most cases of vascular repair a graft implantation is needed. Homografts have been proven to be suitable conduits when no autogenous graft is available. High viability index of vein homograft was confirmed during long term refrigerated storage in tissue culture medium, however there was no data of successful implanted cases. We report two cases of great saphenous vein (GSV) homograft implantation with excellent early results. In the first case graft-popliteal bypass was performed with vein homograft after septic ilio-femoral Dacron graft explantation and aorto-bifemoral Silver bypass procedure. Septic crossover synthetic bypass was replaced with GSV homograft in the second case. Long term storage of vein allografts at 4 C is a valuable and cost-effective option for revascularization and we propose wide-scale introduction of this method.