Vacuum-assisted venous drainage has been reported to offer benefits for adults undergoing cardiopulmonary bypass, such as improved venous return, lowering priming volume (by eliminating the need to prime the venous line), and the use of smaller venous cannulae. All these benefits would be of particular value in pediatric perfusion because of the unique challenges of these smaller patients and the relatively large components of the CPB circuit.

Open-heart surgery without homologous blood transfusion and with minimally invasive technique have benefited from the introduction of vacuum assisted venous drainage (VAVD). The technique of VAVD in cardiopulmonary bypass circuit has the benefit of improving venous return and results in lowering priming volume. Several cardiac teams have introduced vacuum-assisted cardiopulmonary bypass circuit in order to reduce priming volume for adult and pediatric patients. While improving venous drainage through smaller venous cannulas, VAVD has also been a source of increased microembolism. The implications of this increased number of air microbubbles is still under debate.

In order to help perfusionists to review this interesting subject we collected all papers catallogued in PubMed database from 1999 to 2006 (45 papers) To be able to open and read a pdf file you must use a pdf reader. Here you can find several free pdf readers to install in your computer.