During the surgery of thoracoabdominal aorta, ischemic damage of the spinal cord could manifest itself by partial or complete paraplegia. To avoid from this frightening complication various methods have been used. The purpose of our study is to examine the effectiveness of the methods, such as simple cross clamping, shunting and perfusion of critical radicular arteries and reimplantation of these arteries to the graft interposed in dessending aorta.
The study was done on eight mongrel dogs. Somatosensory Evoked Potentials were monitored for the detection of spinal cord ischemia. In conlusion, we suggest that perfusion and reimplantation of the critical radicular arteries is the most effective method for the prevention of spinal cord ischemia.