Perioperative Neurocognitive Disorder After Cardiac Surgery - A Narrative Study of a Retrospective Casuistic

Delirium is one of the most serious and common neuropsychological complications in the immediate postoperative period of cardiac surgery, always resulting in negative consequences, prolonged hospitalization, and increased early and late morbidity and mortality.

An active search for acute cognitive dysfunction was performed in the electronic medical records written by the multidisciplinary team about the immediate postoperative period of 262 consecutive adult patients undergoing cardiac surgery with cardiopulmonary bypass operated on in 2019 at the Instituto do Coração of Hospital das Clínicas, Faculdade de Medicina, Universidade de São Paulo. To maintain randomness, data were collected from 25 patients per month for a total of 10 months.

Seventy-three patients (27.9%) presented symptoms of delirium or perioperative neurocognitive disorder in the postoperative period, with a median time of four days. The most frequent symptoms were changes in cognition (25.6%), attention (25.2%), and agitation (24.8%). Patients with delirium had a longer intensive care unit stay (median seven days vs. three days, P < 0.001), longer mechanical ventilation (median 977 vs. 535, P < 0.001), longer hospital stay (median 20 days vs. 13 days, P < 0.001), and higher incidence of hospital death (22.2% vs. 3.2%, P < 0.001).

The incidence of delirium immediately after cardiac surgery was high, around 27.9%, which is consistent with values found in the literature. The occurrence of delirium was highly associated with worse outcomes, such as longer hospital stays and mortality.