Abstract

Introduction: As the most common postoperative pulmonary complications after cardiac surgery, atelectasis is one of the most important and serious early postoperative complications and one of the most important causes of prolonged hospitalization, increased costs, and mortality rise. Therefore, the present study was aimed at specifying the frequency of atelectasis in patients following coronary artery bypass graft and its associated factors in Mazandaran Heart Center in 2013-2014.

Materials: The present investigation was a descriptive cross-sectional study in which sequential sampling was used. It was conducted on 375 patients whose coronary artery bypass graft had been performed by the same surgeon and anesthesiologist. For data collection, first the patients' demographic variables and the information of their surgery were retrieved through their profiles, direct observation, patient inquiry, and the collected data were recorded in the data collection forms. Then, atelectasis was measured before the surgery and on the first and second days after it by taking CXR whose results were checked by two radiologists who were not aware of the previous observations. Data were analyzed through t-test, Pearson test, and Chi-square test using SPSS 16.0.

Results: The results of the present study indicated that, 123 out of 375 patients (32.8%) were diagnosed with at least one type of tattletales during the first three days after the surgery. The mean age of the patients who were diagnosed with atelectasis was 62.9 and most of them were female. The results also showed that there was a significant relationship between postoperative frequency of atelectasis and the patients' pulmonary diseases and underlying diseases like diabetes and hyperlipidemia, smoking and alcohol use before the surgery, and transfusion of 4 units of packed red blood cells during the surgery (p<0.05).

Conclusion: Atelectasis is the most common postoperative complication which emerges more in patients with pulmonary and underlying diseases than other patients.

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