Single hospital experience with emergency cardiopulmonary bypass using the portable CPS (Bard) system

One hundred four patients were placed emergently on the Bard CPS portable femoro-femoral bypass system over a 4 year period. Thirty-two patients (31%) were discharged from the hospital. Seventy-six of these patients (73%) required emergency bypass following cardiac arrest, and twenty-eight patients (26%) were in cardiogenic shock or respiratory failure. In the arrest group, no one survived an unwitnessed arrest and those with cardiopulmonary resuscitation times less than 30 minutes had a better survival rate. The highest survival rate was in those patients who did not arrest prior to bypass. Fifty-two percent of these patients were released. The 74 patients receiving interventional therapy on bypass had a higher survival rate than those unable to be treated. Of the thirty patients receiving no intervention, only three (10%) were eventually discharged. For the 19 patients receiving treatment only in the cardiovascular laboratory, the discharge rate was 26%. Of the 55 patients taken to the operating room for surgical correction, 24 (44%) were discharged from the hospital. No patients placed on bypass at an outlying hospital or treated using CPS within 72 hours of a previous open heart procedure survived.