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.