This research project involves a combination of cardiothoracic surgery and one of the greatest modern epidemics, obesity. Cardiac surgery requiring cardiopulmonary bypass is commonplace in Irish hospitals. This technique involves the use of machines to replace the work of the body’s heart and lungs during the operation, thus allowing the heart to be kept still for the duration of the procedure. This is standard for coronary artery bypass surgery.
In preparation for a patient due to go on cardiopulmonary bypass, the patient’s exact height and weight is recorded digitally. This provides us with a data set of accurate information. From this data, the body mass index (BMI) of the cardiac surgery patients in Ireland can be calculated. We propose to compare the trend in this subset of the population as compared to the national trend over the past 10 years. Type two diabetes mellitus (DM) is strongly associated with an increased patient BMI. We will also analyse the patient data to see what proportion of this patient population had diagnosed DM at the time of their operation and how the incidence occurs across the BMI spectrum.
We will compare this data with several other patient outcomes:
Length of hospital stay
Postoperative complication rate
The nature of the cardiac coronary artery bypass graft procedures’ being performed.
Through analysis of this data we will see the trend in BMI in the cardiac surgery patient population over the last 10 years and the consequences that this is having on patients following their operation.
