Acute Kidney Injury After Open Heart Surgery

 Acute kidney injury (AKI) is a term used to describe when the kidney loses its function rapidly. And it's associated with an increase in the level of serum creatinine by 0.5 to 1mg/dL. It can be diagnosed by a plethora of criteria such as the Kidney Disease Improving Global Outcomes (KDIGO) and the Risk, Injury, Failure, Loss, End-stage (RIFLE) criteria. Cardiac surgery-associated AKI (CSA-AKI) is the most prevalent complication in patients following cardiac surgery and is also linked to increased mortality and morbidity rates. In addition, exogenous and endogenous toxins, ischemia and reperfusion, inflammation, oxidative stress, metabolic factors, and neurohormonal activation may all play a role in the development of CSA-AKI. All these factors may be active at varying time intervals and with different degrees of intensity, or may function simultaneously.  Methods: In late 2019, a retrospective study was conducted by reviewing the health data of patients who underwent coronary artery bypass graft (CABG), valvular repairs, and other open cardiac surgeries at the King Abdulaziz University Hospital (KAUH), Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, between November 2014 and June 2019. Information was obtained from the Hospital information system, Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. Of the 159 patients who underwent open-heart surgery at KAUH, 126 (79.2%) were male and 33 (20.8%) were female. Patients below 15 years of age and those with poor renal function prior to open cardiac surgery were excluded. The KDIGO criteria were used to diagnose AKI for our patients.

In this study, 34% of the patients experienced AKI after open cardiac surgery, and the most frequent risk factor encountered was diabetes mellitus (DM), which was present in 97 (61%) patients, followed by angina pectoris in 93 (58.5%) patients. Hypertension was identified in 85 (53.5%) and acute myocardial infarction in 82 (51.6%) patients. There were only two (1.3%) patients with known cases of chronic obstructive lung disease (COPD). Of the surgeries, 131 (82.4%) were classified as elective and 28 (17.6%) were urgent.

The most common risk factor associated with AKI following open-heart surgery is DM, followed by angina pectoris. However, further studies are required to investigate all the cardiac procedures.