Screening of Carotid Artery Stenosis in Coronary ArteryBypass Grafting Patients

Background: we sought to evaluate the routine echo-doppler screening of carotid artery stenosis in patients undergoing coronary artery bypass grafting. methods: a total of 2179 consecutive patients who underwent coronary artery bypass grafting alone or with other cardiac surgery at tehran heart center, tehran-iran, between january 2005 and january 2006 were included in this retrospective study. carotid doppler was performed for 1604 (81.48%) of these patients.results: the patients’ age ranged between 20 and 84 years (mean: 58.33, sd: 10.08 years). of the 1604 patients studied, 1186 (73.9%) were men, 592 (36.9%) had diabetes, 598 (37.3%) were smokers, and 194 (12.1%) cases had significant left main stenosis. twenty-one (1.3%) patients had significant carotid stenosis (> 60% stenosis), which constituted 0.9% of all the bypass surgery candidates. post-operative cerebrovascular accident was not detected in any of the patients with significant carotid stenosis, but cerebrovascular accident occurred in 22 (1.4%) of the patients without carotid stenosis. magnetic resonance angiography (mra) was conducted in 15 patients. in our univariate analysis, female gender (p value = 0.023), hypertension (p value = 0.055), peripheral vascular disease (p value < 0.001), and age (p value = 0.001) were significant in the development of carotid stenosis.conclusion: pre-operative duplex carotid screening seems to be necessary in patients when there is hypertension, peripheral vascular disease, female gender, and advanced age.