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Introduction: It is known that pulmonary hypertension is associated with worse outcome in both cardiac and non-cardiac surgery. The aims of our retrospective analysis were to evaluate the outcomes of our patients with pulmonary hypertension undergoing major orthopedic surgery and to give experience-based recommendations for the perioperative management.Material and methods: From 92 patients with pulmonary hypertension undergoing different kinds of surgical procedures from 2011–2014 in a tertiary academic hospital we evaluated 16 patients with major orthopedic surgery for perioperative morbidity and mortality. Results: Regarding the in-hospital morbidity and mortality, one patient died postoperatively due to pulmonary infection and right heart failure (6.25%) and 6 patients suffered significant postoperative complications (37.5%; bleeding = 1, infection = 1, wound healing deficits = 3; dysrhythmia = 1). Conclusion: Our data show that major orthopedic surgery is feasible with satisfactory outcome even in cases of severe pulmonary hypertension by an individualized, disease-adapted interdisciplinary treatment concept.

Abstract Substantial inflammatory disturbances following major trauma have been found throughout the posttraumatic course of polytraumatized patients, which was confirmed in experimental models of trauma and in vitro settings. As a consequence, the principle of damage control surgery (DCS) has developed over the last two decades and has been successfully introduced in the treatment of severely injured patients. The aim of damage control surgery and orthopaedics (DCO) is to limit additional iatrogenic trauma in the vulnerable phase following major injury. Considering traumatic brain and acute lung injury, implants for quick stabilization like external fixators as well as decided surgical approaches with minimized potential for additional surgery-related impairment of the patient's immunologic state have been developed and used widely. It is obvious, that a similar approach should be undertaken in the case of spinal trauma in the polytraumatized patient. Yet, few data on damage control spine surgery are published to so far, controlled trials are missing and spinal injury is addressed only secondarily in the broadly used ATLS® polytrauma algorithm. This article reviews the literature on spine trauma assessment and treatment in the polytrauma setting, gives hints on how to assess the spine trauma patient regarding to the ATLS® protocol and recommendations on therapeutic strategies in spinal injury in the polytraumatized patient.