Desmopressin does not reduce bleeding and transfusion requirements in congenital heart operations

What Was Tested

This randomized controlled trial paper looks at Vasopressin and Desmopressin.

Its usefulness in patients undergoing complex congenital heart repair with cardiopulmonary bypass is unproved.

Who Took Part

The age groups tagged for this paper are infants, young children, children, teenagers and adults, both men and women.

Sixty patients younger than 40 years of age scheduled for complex congenital heart operation (44 redo, 16 primary) were enrolled in this prospective, randomized, double-blind trial.

Transfusion requirements and postoperative blood loss were recorded.

How the Study Was Run

The design is described as randomized, double-blind and placebo-controlled.

Because people in this Vasopressin study were split into groups at random, differences between the groups are less likely to reflect who happened to join each one.

Blinding on both sides kept the participants and researchers unaware of who received Vasopressin.

A placebo (an inactive look-alike) gave the Vasopressin group a baseline to be compared against.

What Was Measured

PubMed files the paper under topics including Blood Coagulation Tests, Blood Loss, Surgical, Blood Transfusion, Cardiopulmonary Bypass, Deamino Arginine Vasopressin, Heart Defects, Congenital and Hemostasis, Surgical.

What This Means in Plain Language

The paper is a randomized, double-blind and placebo-controlled study of Vasopressin and Desmopressin.

The abstract goes on to report its results in about 4 sentences; this page does not restate them, so read the paper for the findings and their limits.

The publication is from 2000 (The Annals of thoracic surgery), a journal based in Netherlands.

More context: the Vasopressin compound page and the Desmopressin compound page, all human trials.