Automated versus conventional perioperative glycemic control in adult diabetic patients undergoing open heart surgery

Intraoperative glycemic variability is associated with increased risks of mortality and morbidity and an increased incidence of hyperglycemia after cardiac surgery. Accordingly, clinicians tend to use a tight glucose control to maintain perioperative blood glucose levels and therefore the need to develop a less laborious automated glucose control system is important especially in diabetic patients at a higher risk of developing complications.

Patients, aged between 40 and 75 years old, undergoing open heart surgery were randomized to either an automated protocol (experimental) or to the conventional technique at our institution (control).

We showed that the percentage of patients maintained between 7.8-10 mmol.l^-1 was not statistically different between the two groups, however, through an additional analysis, we showed that the proportion of patients whose glucose levels maintained between a safety level of 6.7-10 mmol.l^-1 was significantly higher in the experimental group compared to control group, 14 (26.7%) vs 5 (17.2%) P = 0.025. In addition, the percentage of patients who had at least one intraoperative hyperglycemic event was significantly higher in the control group compared to the experimental group, 17 (58.6%) vs 5 (16.7%), P < 0.001 with no hypoglycemic events in the experimental group compared to two events in the control group. We also showed that longer surgeries can benefit more from using the automated glucose control system, particularly surgeries lasting more than 210 min.

We concluded that the automated glucose control pump in diabetic patients undergoing open heart surgeries maintained most of the patients within a predefined glucose range with a very low incidence of hyperglycemic events and no incidence of hypoglycemic events.

Registered with clinicaltrials.gov (NCT # NCT03314272 , Principal investigator Roland Kaddoum, date of registration: 19/10/2017).