Thursday, February 1, 2007
12081

Immediate Diagnosis and Repair Of Transected Radial Nerve During Radial Artery Harvest For Coronary Artery Bypass Graft

Joseph Wolf, MD, Nikesh Patel, MD, Louis Britton, MD, and Jerome Chao, MD.

Endoscopic radial artery harvesting for coronary artery bypass grafting was introduced by Terada et al in 1988 and has since become the procedure of choice for many cardiac surgery groups. Several studies in the cardiac surgery literature have described the neurologic morbidities associated with the endoscopic approach. The incidence of neurologic sequelae with the endoscopic technique ranges from one to twenty seven percent in the literature. Between eight and eighteen percent of patients have been reported to develop dorsal hand numbness at the twelve month follow up evaluation, suggesting that there has been direct thermal or mechanical damage to the radial sensory nerve. Yet, this injury has never been reported as visualized and repaired. The authors present a case report an inadvertent transection of the superficial radial sensory nerve that took place during the endoscopic harvest of a radial artery for coronary bypass. The injury was visualized by the surgeon on the endoscopic monitor and a plastic surgeon immediately repaired the injured nerve with a NeuraGen nerve conduit. This is the only report in the literature in which a radial artery was harvested with the endoscopic technique and a peripheral nerve injury was diagnosed intraoperatively and immediately surgically repaired.