“…Our data do not suggest any amelioration of lung vascular injury and atelectasis by off-pump as compared to on-pump surgery, and similar degree of pulmonary dysfunction and duration of mechanical ventilation in the ICU, as observed before, even though mechanisms in these studies were not addressed [8,20-23,25-29]. In other observational studies and randomized trials [2,11,17-21,30,31], however, authors found off-pump versus on-pump coronary artery surgery to be associated with less pulmonary complications, less oxygenation impairment, earlier extubation, shorter mechanical ventilation and less often pneumonia, but these observations also remained largely unexplained.…”