Abstract
We experienced three patients with the intra-aortic balloon insertion who complained the abdominal disease. This seems to have arisen because the balloon size is too large for Japanese people. We plan to make new balloons for Japanese to prevent this. We measured the diameter and the length of a portion of the thoracic aorta between the aortic arch and the celiac artery for 45 cases in order to determine appropriate sizes of intra-aortic balloons for Japanese. The relationship between the length of the thoracic aorta (X) and its diameter (Y) is Y=0.15X+6.99 (n=245, r=0.339, p<0.05). Three types of IABP balloons have thus been decided for small-than-average Japanese.
