The Vasoactive-Inotropic Score at 48 hours is a good surrogate marker for adverse postoperative events in pediatric patients undergoing cardiac surgery with cardiopulmonary bypass and is limited by its ability to delineate the underlying cause for an unfavourable clinical course. Thus, other predictors such as the Technical Performance Score are likely to highlight the underlying cause and can be used to improve outcomes. However, patients with a high postoperative VIS score at 48 hours may benefit from closer longer-term follow for outcomes such as late survival, functional class, and need for reoperation.

The outcomes of the arterial switch operation have improved over a period of time with the elimination of coronary artery anatomy as a risk factor for operative mortality in some series. However, cumulatively, when all the series published so far are analyzed, two coronary variations, namely the single sinus coronary artery origin and intramural type, persist as risk factors for an adverse operative outcome.

This is a commentary on a single-institution retrospective review that describes the short-term outcomes of the pediatric patients who underwent re-operative surgery for residual or recurrent coarctation after a previous coarctation repair. There were 51 patients over 12 years.

Multiple ventricular septal defects (m-VSD), are a challenging clinical problem. m-VSD can be onerous to manage. Besides the inability to close all the defects in one operative setting due to inadequate visualization, previously undetected defects may become clinically apparent after the closure of the dominant defects, leading to inadequate ventricular septation. This increases the morbidity from the progression of pulmonary hypertension, persistence of congestive cardiac failure, higher incidence of postoperative heart block, and the need for reoperations.