Prevalence of Preoperative Anemia in Elective Rheumatic Valve Surgery at a Tertiary Care Center in Nepal

Background: Rheumatic Valvular Heart disease (RVHD) is common in developing countries often associated with anemia;however its burden is often overlooked. Anemic patients undergoing surgery are likely to receive blood transfusion, increasing morbidity and mortality. Prevalence of anemia in cardiac surgical patients are studied extensively, however its burden in RVHD is lacking. This study attempted to investigate the prevalence of preoperative anemia in RVHD and its effect on blood transfusion, morbidity and mortality in patients undergoing valve surgery. Methods: This is a retrospective observational study conducted at a tertiary care hospital in Nepal. We considered 340 patients who underwent Rheumatic valve replacement surgery from 2014 January to December 2016 and data on their socio-demographic and clinical characteristics were extracted from the patient’s records. The analyses meeting the study objectives were conducted using IBM SPSS v25 for Windows (IBM Statistical Package for Social Sciences, 2015IBM Corporation, New York, United States). Results: The prevalence of no anemia, mild, moderate, and severe anemia was 34.1%, 57.7%, 39.6%, 2.5%, respectively. The units of Red Blood Cell used for transfusion were 1.2 units, 2.0 units, 2.3 units, and 1.6 units in patients without anemia, and those with mild, moderate and severe anemia respectively. The incidence of reexploration was higher in patients with severe anemia as compared to the non anemic with an incidence of 66.6%. A proportion of the patients with no anemia, mild, moderate and severe anemia with less than 7 days stay in the intensive care unit were 89%, 82%, 84.7% and 100% respectively. The length of hospital stay more than 10 days was seen in 58.9%, 71.6%, 63% and 100% in patients with no anemia, mild, moderate and severe anemia. An overall incidence of mortality in anemic patients was 11% while in non anemic patients was 5.3%. Conclusions: The prevalence of anemia was high in the Nepalese patients with Rheumatic valvular heart disease planned for elective surgery. There was an increased incidence of blood transfusion, longer hospital stay, and increased mortality in anemic patients compared to their non anemic counterparts.

A Case of Giant Mediastinal Liposarcoma of Thymic Origin: A Rare Clinical Entity

Thymoliposarcoma is an exceedingly rare tumor of thymus with a very few cases reported till date. This case study presents a 45-year male with rare type of thymoma. On the contrast-enhanced CT images, there was a large mass lesion of predominantly fat attenuation in the pre-vascular compartment of the mediastinum insinuating on both sides of the visceral compartment of the mediastinum, and extending upto the bilateral cardio phrenic and anterior costophrenic angles, anterior to the right ventricle with loss of fat plane with the pericardium, with few sub-centimetric lymph nodes in the right paratracheal and AP window and a calcified right hilar lymph node, suggestive of well-differentiated liposarcoma/thymoliposarcoma. Initial CT guided tru-cut tissue biopsy was inconclusive, and the repeat biopsy revealed as fibro-collagenous tissue with area of necrosis, focal myxoid changes in the background with presence of cells which are spindle to oval in shape with mild nuclear pleomorphism and negative for S100, Cytokeratin, CD34, desmin. The entire tumor was resected en masse after meticulous dissection without the support of cardiopulmonary bypass (CPB) with an intact pericardium. Final histopathology report of the surgical biopsy specimens is consistent with dedifferentiated thymoliposarcoma with focal ganglionic cell differentiation. Postoperative follow-up CECT of thorax revealed no evidence of residual mass in the pre-vascular compartment. The patient is disease-free and asymptomatic after 6-month and he is under routine follow-up under Radiotherapy department since he received 30 Gy of postoperative radiotherapy (PORT).