A new technique to repair short vena cava inferior in heart transplantation

Mehmet Balkanay; Levent Yılık; Orhan Gökalp; Börteçin Eygi; Yüksel Beşir; Nagihan Karahan; Ali Gürbüz

doi:10.5606/tgkdc.dergisi.2016.12924

Mehmet Balkanay¹, Levent Yılık¹, Orhan Gökalp¹, Börteçin Eygi², Yüksel Beşir², Nagihan Karahan³, Ali Gürbüz¹

¹Department of Cardiovascular Surgery, Medical Faculty of İzmir Katip Çelebi University, İzmir, Turkey
²Departments of Cardiovascular Surgery, Medical Faculty of İzmir Katip Çelebi University, Training and Research Hospital, İzmir, Turkey
³Departments of Anaesthesiology and Reanimation, Medical Faculty of İzmir Katip Çelebi University, Training and Research Hospital, İzmir, Turkey

DOI : 10.5606/tgkdc.dergisi.2016.12924

In heart transplantation, surgical techniques and their long-term results are well-established in four decades. Although it may vary individually, a surgeon may still face surgical obstacles such as short vena cava inferior. This poses particularly a greater problem when using bicaval technique during surgery. Leading causes for short vena cava are donor-recipient size mismatch; inappropriate donor cardiectomy technique or extreme tissue adhesions in redo surgeries. In such cases, a simple patch can be used to repair the missing part of vena cava inferior. In this article, we report a 57-year-old male patient in whom we used a tubular patch, which was prepared from the recipient’s atrial tissue in bicaval orthotopic heart transplantation.

Keywords : Heart; short vena kava; transplantation

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