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New approach to systemic vascular resistance calculation and clinical decision making
1Department of Anesthesiology, Middelheim General Hospital, Antwerpen, Belgium.
Abstract:
The Systemic Vascular Resistance (SVR) obtained by invasive monitoring is frequently used in critical-care medicine to guide the use of vasodilators or vasopressors. This study was designed to illustrate the importance of distinguishing between vascular and blood viscosity components when interpreting particular SVR values. The calculation of a corrected SVR is proposed to provide a "standard" C-SVR that gives a better picture of the true vascular changes. 100 patients were studied during hypothermic cardiopulmonary bypass (CPB) in order to illustrate the importance of this concept. The regular SVR was repeatedly measured and compared with the C-SVR. At all times the uncorrected SVR was significantly lower than the corrected C-SVR, which underlines the importance of calculating this parameter.