Welcome back to Behind the Knife and our Cardiac Surgery Crash Course.

As we mentioned before, the Cardiac OR can be a daunting place for any medical

student or resident who finds themselves on a Cardiac Surgery rotation.

Our Cardiac Surgery Crash Course is a short series focused on high yield topics, self-introduced

students and residents to Cardiac Surgery prior to or during a Cardiac Surgery rotation.

My name is Jess Kamalar.

And I'm Aaron Williams, a Cardiac thoracic surgery fellow at Duke.

And we will be your host for today's episode.

We hope you find our series useful and if you have any suggestions or requests, please

feel free to reach out to us by email, which you can find on the show notes for this episode.

So today's topic will be coronary artery disease and how we treat this surgically with

coronary artery bypass grafting or cabbage.

Today we're going to break down patient presentation, workup, indications, the operation

and some post-operative complications.

Now this is a classic and common operation that pretty much every medical student resident

will come across at some point during their medical career.

Okay, so let's get started and jump right in.

Jess, why is coronary artery disease important first of all?

That's a great question, Aaron.

It's super important because of how common and prevalent it is.

Coronary artery disease or CAD remains the single largest cause of death in the U.S. according

to the CDC, causing more than 600,000 deaths a year.

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