Purpose: Intra-operative hypotension (IOH) is associated with a poor post-operative outcome. Consequently, it seems important to reduce the incidence of hypotensive events during anesthesia. The Hemosphere TM (Edwards Lifescience Co., Irwin, CA, USA) platform provides the Hypotension Prediction Index (HPI), a predictive marker for a drop in blood pressure within a few minutes. We report the results of one year of application of a simple HPIalgorithm aiming at reducing the incidence of IOH in open abdominal aortic repair (oAAr), a type of surgery during which hemodynamic stability is notably challenging. Methods: We report the incidence of IOH in 40 patients submitted to oAAr in our tertiary Humanitas Research Hospital in Milan (Italy). The duration and severity of IOH was calculated by mean the Time Weighted Average (TWA) as follows: TWA = [(65-MAP) × time in hypotension]/Duration of monitoring. We compared TWA in our cohort with our preceding case series monitored by FloTrac/EV1000 TM . Results: TWA, expressed as median and IQR range, was 0.3 (0.00÷0.73) mmHg while the duration of an hypotensive event was 2.0 (1.3÷3.1) minutes. The intra-operative time spent in hypotension was 3.54% and the number of hypotensive episodes for each patient was 1.5 (1÷3). TWA resulted lower than the comparison ones and lower than the value observed in the study performed by Wijnberge (TWA = 0.44 mmHg × minute) conducted in major surgery.
Conclusions:In open abdominal aortic surgery, the application of a simple algorithm based on HPI, seems to be able to reduce the incidence, severity and duration of arterial hypotension.