Background and Goal of Study: The intravenous propofol and the inhaled sevoflurane are known anesthetic agents that are commonly used to induce patients in anesthesia in cardiosurgery including bypass graft. A number of studies have been conducted in order to compare these two drugs for their cardioprotective properties, with controversial results. The aim of this study was to compare the anesthetic agents, sevoflurane and propofol, in cardiosurgery with bypass graft for their cardioprotective properties and for their ability to maintain the patient`s hemodynamic stability during the surgery.
Materials and methods: This is a double-blind, prospective, randomized and controlled clinical trial conducted in a large general hospital of Athens, Greece. The sample of the study consisted of 61 patients who underwent CABG and were anaesthetized with either propofol or sevoflurane. For the statistical analysis of the study we used the statistical package SPSS for Windows (version 21) and the statistical significance was set to p = 0.05.
Results and discussion: The propofol group had significantly higher diastolic blood pressure one hour (64.4±11.4 vs 56.9±12.5 mmHg, p< 0.05) and 4 hours after the start of the surgery (55.6 ±9.7 vs 48.4±7.7 mmHg, p< 0.05) and received significantly higher dose of postoperative anesthesia (4.3±4.3 vs 2.5±1.9 ml/hr, p< 0.05) than the sevoflurane group. Also, the patients who received propofol had significantly higher troponin concentration 8 hours after the end of surgery than the sevoflurane group (1202.7±551.7 vs 175.5±139.3ng/ml, p < 0.05). Patients who received sevoflurane compared with propofol group had significantly higher levels of oxygen saturation two hours after the start of surgery (99.6±0.7 vs 98.9±1.3%, p< 0.05), higher dose of dobutamine four hours after the start of surgery (21.1±6.3 vs 16.3±7.7 mg, p < 0,05) and higher VAS-pain scale scoring after extubation (4.6±2.8 vs 3.1±2.4, p< 0.05).
There are studies indicating the cardioprotective effects of sevoflurane (Soro et al., 2012), other support the administration of propofol (Yildirim et al., 2009) and others found no difference between the two drugs (De Hert et al., 2009)
Conclusion: A sevoflurane based anaesthesia in patients undergoing coronary bypass graft surgery may benefit patients maintaining aimodynamic stability during surgery and by decreasing the troponin release 8 hrs after surgery, supporting the cardioprotective effects of sevoflurane over propofol.

Comparison of the cardioprotective properties of Propofol and Sevoflurane in patients undergoing coronary surgery with cardiopulmonary bypass