Surgical Procedure and Times
The most performed surgical technique was the bicaval/unipulmonar (96.4%); however, in 3 (3.6%) cases, biatrial surgery was performed before institutional surgical consensus. Thirteen patients (15.7%) had a previous sternotomy. An extension of the inferior vena cava with a bovine pericardial patch and another with a dacron tube had to be performed in 2 children. Two patients underwent combined simultaneous heart and kidney transplantation from the same donor. Three patients (3.6%) left the operating room with extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO) support.
Mean recipients’ waiting time was 12.7 ± 28 weeks (0 - 232 weeks), mean ischemia time was 3.1 ± 1.2 hours (1.3 – 6.4 hours), mean operating time was 6.1 ± 1.9 hours (3.1 – 15.2 hours), mean cardiopulmonary bypass (CPB) time was 3 ± 1.5 hours (1.3 – 11.1 hours), and mean aortic cross-clamp time was 1.7 ± 0.8 hours (0.8 – 6.8 hours). Regarding the waiting time, there were no significant differences between sexes (p = 0.57) but there were between age groups (p = 0.01) with an average time in adults of 8.9 ± 13.2 weeks, compared with 40.6 ± 69.3 weeks in children. On the other hand, there were no significant differences between sexes and age groups of ischemia (p = 0.18) (p = 0.12), operating (p = 0.41) (p = 0.94), CPB (p = 0.41) (p = 0.30), nor aortic cross-clamp (p = 0.42) (p = 0.52) times, respectively.