Anesthetic Management of a Patient with Sickle Cell Haemoglobinopathy Undergoing Open Heart Surgery

Abstract

Sickle cell disease is a congenital haemoglobinopathy with a high incidence of perioperativecomplications. Traditional anaesthetic management, based largely on extrapolation from biochemicalmodels, has emphasized avoidance of red cell sickling to prevent exacerbations of thedisease. The primary goal of cardiac surgery is not just minimally acceptable outcome where patient survives without life threating complication or persistant clinically manifest organ dysfunctions or simply hospital survival but healthy productive long term survivor ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ Keywords:Anaesthesia; complications, acute chest syndrome; complications, sickle cell disease;pain, crisis; surgery, dehydration, infections, hypoxia, inflammatory cascades, and acidosis