Post-operative arrhythmia among children who undergone cardiac surgery for congenital heart disease at Cardiac Center in Ethiopia.

Introduction : Early postoperative cardiac arrhythmia is a widely recognized complication of heart surgery in children with congenital heart disease. This study aimed to assess the pattern of post cardiac surgery arrhythmia among children with congenital heart disease. Methods: A facility based cross sectional study was conducted involving 202 children with congenital heart diseases and operated between January 2018 and December 2020 at Cardiac center-Ethiopia. Data was retrospectively collected from the patients’ chart using a standard checklist and analyzed using SPSS version 26. Frequencies, percentage, and mean or median values were used to describe the data. The magnitude of cardiac arrhythmia was compared across different characteristics of the children using chi-square test. Results: The median age of the participants was 4.4 years with an inter-quartile range of 4.1 years. Cardiac arrhythmia was documented among 16 (7.9%) children operated. Regarding the types of arrhythmias, junctional ectopic tachycardia was the most common and it was identified among 10 (62.5%) of children who developed postoperative cardiac arrhythmia. Postoperative cardiac arrhythmia was associated with increased cardio-pulmonary bypass time (123.1 vs. 83.7 minutes; p-value =.001), and aortic-cross-clumping time (79.33 vs. 50.42 minutes; p value=0.02). Furthermore, the arrhythmia was also associated with post-operative hypokalemia with p value= 0.02 and having cyanotic congenital heart disease with p-value of 0.001. Conclusion: Considerable number of early postoperative arrhythmia was identified among children with congenital heart disease in the setting. Postoperative cardiac arrhythmia was associated with cardiopulmonary bypass time (CPBT), aortic cross-clump time, young age, and cyanotic congenital heart disease.