Cervical Repair of Iatrogenic Tracheobronchial Injury by Tracheal T-Incision

BACKGROUND Tracheobronchial injury is a rare but potentially life-threatening condition. Various surgical treatment options have been described for symptomatic patients with full-thickness injury. However, studies comprising a meaningful number of patients are sparse.METHODS We retrospectively analyzed all patients who received surgical repair of tracheobronchial injury between January 1999 and May 2021 at the Department of Thoracic Surgery, Medical University of Vienna. Patient character-istics, surgical variables, postoperative morbidity, and mortality were retrieved and analyzed.RESULTS Fifty patients with a median age of 68 years (range, 17-88) were included in the analysis. The etiologies of the iatrogenic tracheobronchial injuries were emergency intubation (48%), elective percutaneous dilatation tra-cheostomy (38%), or elective intubation (14%). The most common location of tracheobronchial injuries was distal third (28%) with a median length of 50 mm (range, 20-100 mm). The surgical approach was cervicotomy in 52%, thoracotomy in 38%, sternotomy in 2%, and combined approaches in 8% of cases. Moreover, intraoperative venovenous (n = 4) or venoarterial (n = 2) extracorporeal membrane oxygenation support was required in 12% of cases. Procedure-related mortality was 0%. However, as patients with tracheobronchial injury usually have severe comorbidities, the rate of patients discharged alive from the intensive care unit was only 66%. The median follow-up period of discharged patients was 5.5 months (range, 0.7-209). Airway stenosis or dehiscence was not observed in any patient.CONCLUSIONS Surgical repair of tracheobronchial injuries can be performed safely with a low procedure-related morbidity. If possible, the less-invasive cervical access should be preferred for patients with tracheobronchial injury, even for injuries extending to the main bronchi.(Ann Thorac Surg 2022;114:1863-70)(c) 2022 by The Society of Thoracic Surgeons. Published by Elsevier Inc.This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).

Automated summary

In this study, all patients who underwent surgical repair of tracheobronchial injury at the Department of Thoracic Surgery, Medical University of Vienna between January 1999 and May 2021 were retrospectively analyzed. Patient characteristics, surgical variables, postoperative morbidity, and mortality were retrieved and analyzed.