According to the American Heart Association, coronary artery bypass graft surgery is a useful tool in treating patients who have significant narrowing and blockages in the coronary arteries. During the operation, doctors use blood vessels from the patient's body to create a new route for blood to travel around the damaged section of artery. This new passage way allows sufficient amounts of blood to flow into the heart muscle. If a patient does not respond to medication and is not a good candidate for less invasive surgical operations, doctors may choose to perform bypass surgery.
Open Heart Surgery
In traditional open heart bypass graft surgery, the surgeon makes a 6- to 8-inch incision down the middle of the patient's chest. To minimize the damage that reduced blood flow could cause, the heart is cooled with cold salt water. During the surgery, the heart is stopped, and the blood is channeled through a heart-lung machine. The surgeon can bypass up to four coronary arteries during a single surgery. Patients often need to have these surgeries at 10-year intervals, because it is likely that 35 percent of their vein grafts have narrowed once more. The patients typically stay in the hospital for up to a week after the operation.
Beating Heart Bypass Grafting
A surgeon may choose to do an off-pump heart bypass surgery, also called a beating heart bypass graft. The benefit of this procedure is that the heart is not stopped. Otherwise, the off-pump operation resembles the traditional bypass graft surgery. A surgeon still needs to make a large incision in the middle of the chest and saw the breast bone open. Jakub J. Regieli, M.D and colleagues showed that patients who had an off-pump surgery had fewer of the memory and learning-related problems that are quite frequent after a traditional heart bypass surgery. This study was presented in November of 2009 at the "American Heart Association's Scientific Sessions."
Minimally Invasive Heart Bypass
Minimally invasive heart bypass surgery resembles off-pump heart bypass operation, except that a surgeon does not open the chest with a large incision. Instead, she makes several small incisions between the bones of the ribcage on the left side of the chest. The heart is not stopped in this surgery, and no heart-lung machine is used. The surgery can also be performed with the help of robotic arms. In such cases, an incision the size of a keyhole can be used.
