Off-pump coronary artery bypass grafting (OPCABG): the beginning of the end?

Authors

  • David Taggart University of Oxford, Oxford, UK

Abstract

[first paragraph of article]

Since the early descriptions of off-pump coronary artery bypass grafting (OPCABG) more than three decades ago, debate has continued about its relative potential merits or disadvantages in comparison to on-pump CABG (ONCABG). Proponents argue that OPCABG reduces the damaging effects of cardiopulmonary bypass, particularly in higher risk patients, whilst sceptics maintain that it is actually inferior to the “gold standard” ONCABG with less effective revascularisation and inferior graft patency. Consequently while the numbers of OPCABG have plateaued at around 15–20% of all CABG in the developed world, in the developing world and Far East the proportion of OPCABG is over 80% of all cases. 

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Published

2017-05-29

Issue

Vol. 2013 No. 3 (2013)

Section

Lessons from the trials

License

This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution license CC BY 4.0, which permits unrestricted use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.