Myocardial Revascularization by Internal Thoracic Arterial Implants: Longterm Follow-up

¹ Division of Cardiovascular and Thoracic Surgery, Veterans Administration Hospital, Oteen, N.C.

A 100 percent follow-up report on 198 patients who underwent implantation of either a single internal thoracic artery (185 patients) or both arteries (13 patients) into the left ventricular myocardium up to ten and a half years after operation, is presented. Surgical (30-day) mortality was 8.5 percent. Implant arteriograms, performed in 89 percent of the survivors one year after operation, were graded according to the degree of opacification of the implant and the collateralized coronary artery. It was not possible to correlate symptomatic improvement, incidence of myocardial infarction after operation, or survival rate with the degree of opacification of vessels at implant arteriography, even in those patients with single implants in whom myocardial ischemia was lmited to the area of the implant. The cumulative survival curve based on these cases did not show any significant difference from that reported by others for patients with angina pectoris who were not treated surgically.