BNP and Vascular Surgery

Background and rationale of the study: Patients undergoing non-cardiac major surgery show a perioperative cardiac risk and postoperative complications, that can be stratified based on parameters linked to patient's conditions and to surgery types. An accurate identification of this risk could offer numerous advantages for these patients, who's 30-day mortality is around 2%. The identification of the correct risk could lead to a better pre- and postoperative management, that could guarantee a better surgery outcome and a faster postoperative recovery. To this day there is no perfect method to correctly estimate this risk. Various studies show that high BNP levels are linked to cardiac events at 30 and 180 days. Further investigations identify different groups, at low, intermediate and high risk, based on BNP levels. BNP is released by ventricular myocytes in response to a wall distress, due to an increased volume, pressure or myocardial ischemia. So BNP plasma levels could be used as a prognostic and diagnostic marker, improving the cardiac risk stratification in patients undergoing surgery and a much more precise management. This study is determined to do an evaluation of the correlations between pre- and postoperative BNP levels and the incidence of cardiac events in patients undergoing major vascular surgery.