Pleural Effusions After Cardiac Surgery

Pleural effusions are common in patients recovering from cardiac surgery. Symptomatic patients with pleural effusions complain of shortness of breath, cough, chest pain and are more hypoxic and tachypneic. Clinically significant effusions can slow recovery in the hospital and beyond, and are a critical source of hospital readmissions after discharge. It is not well characterized how this impacts hospital outcomes. Further it is unknown if the effusions themselves are associated with impaired outcomes, or if pleural effusions simply arise in more complicated, older patients, thus suggesting the impaired outcomes are the result of coexisting morbidities. To better understand the impact of this complication and to address the question mentioned before, this study was carried out to determine the clinical and economic outcomes of pleural effusions in propensity-matched patients during early recovery from cardiac surgery. To compare patient groups with and without pleural effusion, the following baseline characteristics were used: e.g. age, sex, body-mass-index, priority of surgery, type of surgery, duration of surgery, APACHE II Score of patients on admission in the ICU.