Left ventricular surgical remodeling after the STICH trial

Surgical treatment of anteroseptal scars has been, and still is, a challenging task for cardiac surgeons. Most patients are in heart failure and the infarcted areas can include different parts of the septum and the anterior wall. The core problem of ischemic congestive heart failure is the undue demand placed on the residual viable left ventricle myocardium. The surgical techniques used to correct the mismatch between contractile and asynergic areas differ, but the evolution of surgical techniques for left ventricular surgical remodeling (LVSR) is still a work in progress. The most popular one was proposed by Dor et al. in the 1980s and is still in general use. This technique addressed the problem of recovering a predictable volume but not necessarily the problem of rebuilding a physiologically conical shape. This anatomical aspect is becoming increasingly important, and the purpose of septal reshaping, as proposed by us in 2004, is more to recover a conical shape than to achieve volume reduction. Thus, we use the Dor operation only when septoapical scars are present. The need for a different surgical strategy is emphasized by the result of the STICH trial, which reports the data of 1000 patients randomized for coronary artery bypass grafting (CABG, n = 499) or CABG and LVSR (n = 501) and which failed to show any benefit of LVSR. However, the only surgical technique used was the classic Dor operation, where the purpose was to reestablish volume and not to recreate a physiological shape. This study, however, does not provide a definitive answer, as echocardiography results included only 212 patients in the CABG arm and 161 in the CABG and LVSR arm. Furthermore, previous myocardial infarction (MI) was not a prerequisite for study inclusion (13 % of patients in each group had no previous MI) and whether a previous MI was Q-wave or not was not specified. In conclusion, the long-term results after LVSR are satisfactory but appear to be better if a conical shape has been recreated. The role of preemptive surgery in selected cases and how to establish the limits of LVSR (grade of preoperative diastolic dysfunction, diastolic diameter, ventricular volumes, function of the remote zone, etc.) is still unclear. The impact of each individual treatment in the individual patient (medical treatment, CABG alone, CABG and LVSR) has still to be identified.