Immediate outcome following valve surgery for rheumatic heart disease: the first local experience from Ethiopia

Rheumatic heart disease is the most common cardiac diseases in developing countries including Ethiopia. The current study aimed to describe the immediate surgical outcome following valve surgery for rheumatic heart disease in Ethiopia.

Data were collected through chart abstraction from two centres in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia: the Cardiac Center of Ethiopia and El Ouzier cardiac centre. Included were all patients who were operated for rheumatic valvular heart disease in the mentioned centres by local cardiac surgical team during the period from June 2017 to April 2020. Demographic and clinical characteristics of the study population at admission and within 30 days of the index cardiac surgery were collected. Statistical Package for Social Sciences version 20.0 for windows was used to analyse the data.

Of the 114 patients included in the study (median age 31 years with interquartile range of 23-40), 62 (54.4%) of them were female. Surgical procedures done were triple valve surgery 9 (7.9%) patients, mitral and tricuspid valves 26 (22.8%) patients, double-valve 16 (14.0%) patients, single-valve surgery 50.9% (11 aortic and 47 mitral valves) of patients, redo mitral valve surgery 3 (2.6%) patients, and left maze with mitral valve surgery 2 (1.8%) patients. Of the total, 103 (90.4%) of them had mitral valve surgery. Post-operatively, 5 (4.4%) patients died within 30 days following the index surgery.

Immediate surgical outcome following valve surgery for rheumatic heart disease had excellent outcome in our setting. This evidence can be taken as a show of success in building local capacity to manage rheumatic heart disease surgically.