[Tetralogy of Fallot--new appearance of an old technique].

UNLABELLED: Tetralogy of Fallot represents one of the most frequent congenital heart disease in medical practice and a "corner stone" of any paediatric surgical team due to great anatomic and functional variability and clinical aspects. This paper presents a retrospective study of surgical experience in patients with tetralogy of Fallot admitted in Paediatric Cardiovascular Centre of Târgu Mureş, Romania, between 2005, October to 2009, January.

METHOD: There where retrospectively studied medical records of patients who undergo a surgical procedure: age, morphologic diagnosis, symptoms and type of surgical procedure, intraoperative data, postoperative follow-up and complications.

RESULTS

In this period 110 cases of tetralogy of Fallot were operated, 81 total surgical repair (54 primary and 27 secondary procedures); also there were performed 29 "palliative" procedures: systemic/pulmonary shunts (eg. Blalock-Taussig). No intraoperative deaths were recorded; the percentage of in-hospital mortality was 1.8%.

CONCLUSIONS

It's ideal to perform total primary repair of tetralogy of Fallot, especially in the first year of life; extreme cases (severe hypoplasic pulmonary arteries, emergency cases) benefit from "palliative" procedures. Surgical repair of Fallot tetralogy can be performed, with good results in specialised paediatric cardiac surgery centres. This paper represents the first Romanian clinical study on a large number of patients with tetralogy of Fallot surgically treated.