Objective To investigate the iron deficiency (ID) in children with congenital heart disease (CHD) and find high risk factors of ID. Methods The clinical data of 227 pediatric patients with CHD from February to June 2016 were retrospectively analyzed. The incidence of ID according to the result of iron metabolism examination (serum ferritin <12 μg/L as the diagnostic criteria) was investigated. According to their basic CHD types, patients were divided into a cyanotic group and an acyanotic group. We tried to find the high risk factors of ID in those pediatric CHD patients by comparing their age, gender, growth condition and blood routine test results. Results There were 19.8% pediatric CHD patients complicated by ID. The incidence of ID in the cyanotic patients was higher than that in the acyanotic patients (31.0% vs. 17.3%, P=0.045). In both groups, ID patients presented the characteristics of younger age, higher anemia rate, lower mean corpuscular volume (MCV), lower mean corpuscular hemoglobin (MCH), lower mean corpuscular-hemoglobin concentration (MCHC) and longer red blood cell distribution width (RDW). Conclusion Cyanosis, younger age (infant), anemia, decreased MCV, decreased MCH, decreased MCHC and increased RDW are high risk factors of ID in CHD children.
ObjectiveTo identify the risk factors of postoperative blood loss among pediatric patients following corrective operation of tetralogy of Fallot (TOF) and to develop nomogram predicting the risk of postoperative blood loss.MethodsA retrospective case-control study was conducted in pediatric TOF patients who underwent corrective operation in our hospital from November 2018 to June 2019. And the clinical data from each enrolled patient were gathered and analyzed. Clinically significant postoperative blood loss was defined as drainage volume from chest tube ≥16 mL/kg during the first 24 h after surgery, which corresponded to the 75th percentile of the blood loss in our population. The primary outcome was to determine the independent predictors of postoperative blood loss by the least absolute shrinkage and selection operator (LASSO) regression, univariate and multivariate logistic regression analysis. On the basis of the independent predictors of postoperative bleeding, nomogram was developed and its discrimination and calibration were estimated.ResultsA total of 105 children were selected (67 males and 38 females aged 3-72 months). The drainage volume from chest tube in the bleeding group was significantly higher than that in the non-bleeding group during the first 24 h (P<0.0001). Multivariate logistic regression analysis showed that low body weight (OR=0.538, 95%CI 0.369-0.787, P=0.001), high preoperative hemoglobin concentration (OR=1.036, 95%CI 1.008-1.066, P=0.013) and prolonged intraoperative aortic cross clamp time (OR=1.022, 95%CI 1.000-1.044, P=0.048) were independent risk factors for postoperative blood loss. In the internal validation, the model displayed good discrimination with a C-index of 0.835 (95%CI 0.745-0.926) and high quality of calibration plots in nomogram models was noticed.ConclusionThe nomogram demonstrated good discrimination and calibration in estimating the risk of postoperative blood loss among pediatric patients following corrective operation of TOF.