New device may reduce complications during heart surgery

Sep 11 2006

Recycling of fat-contaminated blood from the wound during heart surgery, is suspected to contribute to enhance the risk of post-surgical brain damage.

Fatcher - a new device from Astra Tech - reduces fat from the blood and provides a simple and cost-effective alternative to existing high-priced blood washing technologies. At the same time it offers flexibility for the user to choose transfusion strategy when blood loss is known. This smart little bag is only first in line of a series of new and advanced blood handling products from Astra Tech.

The traditional "in-line" recycling of blood loss during heart surgery is a simple routine to economise the use of banked blood and may also be a life-saving procedure in case of critical bleeding. However, this "pericardial suction blood" mixes with fat that drips into the wound from the surrounding tissue. When reinfused, the fat is known to clog small blood vessels of the brain. About 50 % of all heart-surgery patients experience different degrees of cognitive dysfunction, a diffuse form of brain injury that may develop into memory problems and agitation. There is a strong suspicion that fat contributes, together with other mechanisms, to this complication.

The routines regarding surgical blood loss differ greatly: apart from the common routine of continuous recycling into the heart-lung machine, at some centers blood is discarded while others clean the blood. The available methods used for blood washing to reduce fat are quite complicated and expensive. The new device from Astra Tech, called Fatcher, is a simple and easily accessible device. It that can reduce fat to about the same extent as the blood-washing machine, but to a much lower cost and with improved flexibility.

"Fatcher is a simple option to a complex problem. The project is an example of how a clinical concern becomes scientifically explored, and how this science finds its way to the industry with the Umeå University being the link in between" says the inventor of Fatcher Karl Gunnar Engström, Associate Professor at the Heart Center of Umea University in Sweden.

The new product is launched during the EACTS/ESTS joint meeting in Stockholm 9-13 September.

Astra Tech manufactures a wide variety of surgery products with focus on autologous blood handling products. In the coming months Astra Tech will introduce several new inventions in this area.

Astra Tech President and CEO Peter Selley says: "Blood handling products is an important area for Astra Tech. Fatcher is only first in a series of new products developed to meet the unmet medical needs in the field of blood management. The launch of Fatcher and the coming series of new product launches markedly strengthens Astra Techs position."