An alternative to cardioplegia

Prolonged deep hypothermic circulatory arrest in rats can be achieved without cognitive deficits

“…Inducing CA immediately after initiation of DHCA as done in our protocol might preserve energy stores, maintain vascular reactivity and help restore cardiac output after reperfusion. The ultra-short acting beta-blocker esmolol has been used previously to induce CA in both clinical (Pirk and Kellovsky, 1995) and experimental settings (Liachenko et al, 2001). Beta-blockers were shown to improve neurologic outcome after cardiac surgery (Amory et al, 2002) and cerebral ischemia (Goyagi et al, 2006) and could confer substantial pharmacologic protection to the effects of hypothermia in our model, partially explaining the lack of neurological deficits.…”

Reduction of Myocardial Reperfusion Injury by High-Dose β-Blockade with Esmolol

“…Myocardial protection with high-dose b-blockade has been clinically applied for CABG surgery [18,29,30,11], mitral valve replacement [31], and surgery of complex congenital heart disease [32]. The experimental studies presented in this paper have demonstrated an alleviation of myocardial reperfusion injury using high-dose b-blockade in comparison to reperfusion with plain blood or warm blood cardioplegia.…”

The Heavily Calcified Aorta and Re-Do CABG Surgery: Technical Considerations How to Avoid Aortic Crossclamp. How-to-Do-it

“…Recently, myocardial protection with the short acting B-blocker esmolol has been introduced as an alternative to cardioplegic arrest [3][4][5]. Clinical results showed beneficial effects of intraoperative Bblockade in patients with compromised left ventricular function and in patients undergoing emergency CABG surgery [3,6].…”