Background: With the aging of the population, improving the survival of patients sustaining ACS and improving technological solutions for complicated cardiac situations peri-procedural admissions to the ICCU became one of the leading causes for hospitalization in the ICCU.
Aim: To evaluate the contemporary burden of complex cardiac procedures in a large consecutive group of patients admitted to the ICCU.
Methods: We evaluated 1,014 consecutive patients admitted to our ICCU during 2014. Patients were divided into those who underwent complex cardiac procedure (complex PCI, TAVI, EP procedure) or not.
Results: 164 patients (16%) were admitted post complex procedures as the leading cause of them 48%b post TAVI, 22% post EP procedure and 20% post complex PCI. Patients post complex procedure as compared with other patients (N=850) were older (73±13 vs. 64±15, p<0.01), more likely female (37% vs. 24%, p<0.01), and suffered more from anemia (20% vs. 10%, p<0.05). During hospitalization they required more mechanical ventilation (14% vs. 7%, p<0.01), higher rates of bleeding and blood transfusion (7% vs. 2%, p0.05).
Patients post EP procedures had a longer in-hospital course (4 ±4 days vs. 3.2±2, p=0.02) suffered more from CRF (26% vs. 14%, p>0.001); pulmonary hypertension (13% vs. 4%, p<0.001); previous CHF (39% vs. 15%, p<0.001) infection and septic shock (19% vs. 3%, p
Conclusions: Patients admitted to the ICCU post complex cardiac procedures are older, have more co-morbidity and sustain more complicated in-hospital course. As such they present a heavy medical burden and challenge to the medical stuff.
