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Ann Thorac Surg 1995;60:609
© 1995 The Society of Thoracic Surgeons

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Discussion

Discussion

The first 20% of the full text of this article appears below.

See also page 603.

DR HANI SHENNIB (Montreal, PQ, Canada): I enjoyed your presentation, and I have several questions. First, I am concerned about your last statement that you would eliminate the need for doing pulmonary function tests and that perhaps you can determine the immediate outcome of operation without them. You still need pulmonary function tests to look at the long-term effects of operation, eg, functional ability of patients after resection.

My question is, In patients who have had desaturation of less than 90%, have you been able to discriminate outcome based on whether desaturation occurred at any level of function? For example, did the patients with desaturation at rest do worse than the ones with desaturation when they climbed three flights of stairs?

DR RAO: Although we recorded the phase at which a patient had desaturation during exercise oximetry, we did not analyze the results subdivided to the phase of desaturation. Subdividing the analysis, given that only 65 patients showed desaturation with an even smaller number sustaining complications, would not have yielded significantly useful information. Certainly in designing a prospective trial, stratification based on the . . . [Full Text of this Article]