Short-term outcomes in adult cardiac surgery in the use of del Nido cardioplegia solution

Objectives: Del Nido cardioplegia in adult cardiac surgery has not been studied although it has been in common use as a “single” dose cardioplegia in pediatric heart surgery. We retrospectively assessed the short-term (in-hospital) clinical outcomes of patients undergoing aortic valve replacement (AVR) using del Nido cardioplegia solution, comparing it to conventional multi-dose whole blood cardioplegia. Methods: We switched our cardioplegia protocol from conventional whole blood cardioplegia exclusively to del Nido solution in May 2011. In 2011, 240 consecutive patients underwent isolated AVR. One hundred and seventy-eight of them were operated on with the use of del Nido cardioplegia (del Nido group) and whole blood cardioplegia (conventional group) was used in the other 62 patients. Isolated AVR was chosen as a cohort because of its relative simplicity and the similarity of surgical techniques among surgeons. Propensity-score matching identified 54 matched pairs for analysis. Results: The retrograde cardioplegia technique was used in 19 cases (35.2%) in the del Nido group and 52 cases (96.3%) in the conventional group (p