Abstract
Introduction: Primary cardiac tumors are a rare condition presenting with a variety of symptoms. The outcomes of their surgical treatment in the modern era from central Europe have not been recently reported.
Aim: To evaluate the short- and long-term outcomes of the cardiac tumor operations at our department throughout the last 20 years. Material and methods: This was a retrospective analysis of all primary cardiac tumor operations performed at our institution between 2000 and 2020.
Perioperative data were extracted from patient records. Long-term data were provided by the National Registry of Cardiac Surgery.
Results: Sixty procedures for primary cardiac tumor were performed throughout the study period. The most common type of tumor was myxoma (88%), followed by fibroelastoma (8%), lipoma (2%) and sarcoma (2%).
There were 2 perioperative deaths (3%). The most common perioperative complication was atrial fibrillation (47%).
One (2%) patient underwent reoperation 6 years later because of myxoma recurrence. We recorded 13 long-term deaths, but only 1 patient died as a consequence of cardiac tumor (sarcoma) 15 months after the surgery.
Long-term survival of the cohort was comparable with the age- and sex-matched general population up to 15 years postoperatively (relative survival 0.91, CI 0.68-1.23). Rich histopathological illustrations are provided in the online supplementary material.
Conclusions: Surgical resection is the standard treatment of primary cardiac tumors. The outcomes of benign tumors are excellent and the long-term postoperative survival is comparable with the general population.
The prognosis of malignant tumors remains poor.