Muscle tamponade to control venous bleeding around grafts to deeply intramyocardial coronary arteries

Considerable difficulty may be encountered in controlling persistent venous bleeding from the cut myocardial edges when coronary grafts have to be constructed to a deeply intramyocardial portion of the left anterior descending coronary artery. We describe a safe, inexpensive, and highly effective method of dealing with this problem using muscle tamponade with a prepared segment of rectus abdominis muscle. The technique has been used with uniform success and without complication in more than 60 patients.