IJCS | Volume 32, Nº1, January/ February 2019

32 Table 4 - Additional expenditures for complications Complications Average costs (± standard deviation) Additional costs due to complications Mean length of hospitalization (± standard deviation) Additional time of hospitalization due to complications All patients 22,647.24 (±28,105.66) - 32.3 (±22.7) - Patients without complications 13,996.57 (±5,800.61) - 25.3 (±11.6) - Patients with any complication 35,400.28 (±40,509.47) 21,403.71 42.8 (±29.9) 17.5 Patients with any specific complication compared to all the other patients Infectious complications 53,949.79 (±56,814.94) 37,007.95 58.0 (±38.6) 30.3 Cardiovascular complications 45,899.94 (±56,287.27) 27,490.88 50.1 (±39.2) 21.0 Arrhythmia 31,760.52 (±22,416.23) 10,268.49 39.8 (±15.9) 8.4 Bleeding 37,196.45 (±25,855.71) 15,658.35 43.6 (±18.1) 12.1 Table 5 - Mean expenditures according with the number of complications Number of complications N Mean 0 141 13,996.57 1 39 17,344.37 2 26 38,109.85 3 13 68,789.86 4 7 59,340.00 5 2 104,596.52 Unspecified 12 Total 228 p < 0.001 (Kruskal-Wallis test). Barbosa et al. Complications of CABG and hospital expenses Int J Cardiovasc Sci. 2019;32(1)28-34 Original Article is a procedure of high complexity and cost, and it is performed in a large number of patients during the treatment of ischemic cardiac disease, allowing for a rational and evidence-based use of healthcare resources. In this study, the average cost of hospitalization was higher than that found in other studies carried out in Brazil. A prospective study performedwith 103 coronary patients submitted to isolated elective CABG, observed that the average cost of hospitalization was R$ 6,990.30. 3 The occurrence of complications is associated with increased hospitalization costs, but this increase depends on the type of complication observed. The most frequent were infectious and cardiovascular complications, followed by arrhythmia and bleeding. The patients who presented cardiovascular complications, infectious complications and bleeding in the CABG postoperative period had a higher average hospitalization cost than the patients without these complications, because they consumedmorematerial and human resources. In addition, they demanded a longer length of hospital stay. Twenty-sevenpatientswerediagnosedwitharrhythmia- related complications during the postoperative period. The occurrence of atrial fibrillation (AF) was 12.2%, corresponding to 20 patients, a lower percentage compared to the percentage observed in another study, in which 33.6% of the patients presented atrial fibrillation. 4 This result is in accordancewith a study that observed that atrial fibrillation occurred in 15.2% of the patients analysed 5 and another study that observed that atrial fibrillation occurred in 17.2% of patients, being the most frequent complication. 6 Another study demonstrated that patients who evolved with atrial fibrillation during the CABG postoperative period had a higher average hospitalization cost compared to the patients without arrhythmia, 7 which cannot be confirmed by this study. Patients who evolved with infectious complications had a higher cost compared to the patients who evolved without nosocomial infections. HILLIS LD et al., 8 demonstrated that nosocomial infections during CABG hospitalization are frequent events, occurring in 10 to 20% of cardiac surgery patients, with superficial wound infection occurring in 2% to 6% of patients after cardiac