• Vassilios Smyrniotis, Kassiani Theodoraki, Nikolaos Arkadopoulos, Georgios Fragulidis, Agathi Condi-Pafiti, Matrona Plemenou-Fragou, Dionysios Voros, John Vassiliou, and Panagiotis Dimakakos.
• Second Department of Surgery, University of Athens, School of Medicine, Areteion Hospital, 76 Vas. Sofias Av., 115 28, Athens, Greece. vsmyrniotis@hotmail.com
• Am. J. Surg. 2006 Nov 1; 192 (5): 669-74.

BackgroundThe aim of this study was to compare ischemic preconditioning with the intermittent vascular occlusion technique in liver resections performed under inflow and outflow occlusion.MethodsFifty-four patients with resectable liver tumors assigned were randomly to undergo surgery with either ischemic preconditioning (IP group, n = 27) or with intermittent vascular occlusion (IVO group, n = 27). Both groups were compared regarding surgical parameters, aspartate transaminase levels, and apoptosis.ResultsFor warm ischemic time less than 40 minutes, no significant difference was noticed between the 2 groups apart from caspase-3 activity, which was higher in the IVO group than in the IP group (17.2 +/- 3.4 vs. 10.3 +/- 5.2, P < .05). When warm ischemia exceeded 40 minutes, the IP group showed higher levels in blood aspartate transaminase levels on day 3 (442 +/- 178 IU/L vs. 305 +/- 104 IU/L, P < .05) and higher caspase-3 levels (26.5 +/- 5.7 count/high-power field [hpf] vs. 20.7 +/- 3.6 count/hpf, P < .05) and apoptotic activity (28.5 +/- 7.5 count/hpf vs. 20.2 +/- 4.1 count/hpf, P < .05), as compared with the IVO group.ConclusionsAlthough both techniques showed comparable efficacy for short ischemic times, intermittent vascular occlusion provided better cytoprotection when ischemia exceeded 40 minutes.

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