Traumatic aorta to pulmonary artery fistula.

Following the original successful repair of a penetrating wound of the heart in 1897 by Professor Rehn, many successful operations of this type have been performed. There have, however, been relatively few reports of successful repair of penetrating wounds of the aorta. Fortyeight such cases have been described between 1922 and 1970 (Lam and McIntyre, 1970; Rogers, Chesler, and du Plessis, 1969; Symbas and Sehdeva, 1970): in only nine of these was a traumatic communication between the aorta and pulmonary artery found and repaired (Table). In this paper we present the clinical features and surgical repair of a traumatic chronic aorta to pulmonary artery fistula which we believe to be the tenth successfully repaired case in the literature.