Let me tell you, folks, we’ve got something huge to talk about. We’re looking at the battle of the giants in heart surgery for those tiny, brave hearts dealing with hypoplastic left heart syndrome (HLHS) or its variants. It’s the Hybrid versus the Norwood procedure. This is big, really big. Our team, the best team, started using the Hybrid in 2004, and we’ve been tracking this showdown meticulously since then.

We divided our study into eight eras, from way back in 1984 all the way to 2022. That’s a lot of data, the best data. We wanted to see which procedure is the champion when it comes to saving lives in the hospital. We looked at the numbers, crunched them with the most sophisticated methods. We’re talking ordered logistic regression, the Tukey-Kramer post-hoc procedure – only the best for this study.

Here’s the deal: the Norwood, a tried and true warrior, was chosen 1,899 times. The Hybrid, the newcomer, was used in 82 cases. But, and this is huge, the use of the Hybrid has been going up, hitting 30% in the latest era. That’s a lot of trust in the new guy. But, and it’s a big but, when we adjusted for all the risk factors, guess what? The Hybrid, despite its rising star status, is actually associated with higher hospital mortality. That’s right, higher.

Even with the Hybrid getting more popular, the overall mortality hasn’t budged. It’s plateaued. And after we adjusted for everything that could possibly matter, the Hybrid still showed a higher mortality compared to the Norwood. So, what we’re saying here, and we’re saying it loud and clear, is that despite the Hybrid’s promise, the Norwood is still the king of the ring when it comes to saving these precious lives.