Abstract
Historically, open heart surgery was attempted since 1950 and unfortunately the incidence of post-transfusion hepatitis (PTH) after open heart surgery was over 50% in Japan.
Since 1970 open heart surgery without homologous blood transfusion has been attempted under simple deep hypothermia or hypothermia with Pump-Oxygenator in order to prevent various complications caused by homologous blood transfusion, especially PTH. The lowest weight patient upon whom this method was performed hypothermia with Pump-Oxygenator was 5.0kg with reducing in priming volume and using auto-blood transfusion system.
Recently the incidenence of PTH, such as Non-A, non-B type hepatitis, so called C type hepatitis has been reduced to 0.16% by progressive screening method.
However open heart surgery without homologous blood transfusion should be still continued to prevent human immunodeficiency virus infection (HIV) or graft-versus-host disease (GVHD) after fresh blood transfusion.
