How To Repair A Hole In The Heart

Patching Device Repairs Pigsty in Heart

Mar. 23 -- Thursday, May 10 (HealthDay News) -- Emergency use of a patching device tin help patients avoid high-run a risk surgery when a heart attack tears a hole between the ventricles, the lower blood-pumping chambers of the centre, researchers report.

"These patients often are too ill to become to surgery at one time," explained Dr. Matthew W. Martinez, a cardiology fellow at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn. "What nosotros are doing is bridging these people so that they become stable enough to survive surgery."

These types of dangerous cardiac tears, chosen a "ventricular septal defect", are fortunately rare and occur in less than one percent of heart attacks, according to Martinez. Yet, drug treatment leaves patients with a ninety percent take chances of death, while surgery carries a 50 percent expiry rate, and then any alternative is welcome, he said.

He was expected to present his team's results Th at the annual scientific sessions of the Lodge for Cardiovascular Angiography and Interventions, in Orlando.

Martinez described 10 patients whose ventricular septal defects were treated at the Mayo Clinic with the patching device betwixt 1995 and 2005. Dr. Donald J. Hagler, professor of pediatrics, besides helped perform the procedures.

Five of the heart wall ruptures were acquired by heart attacks, and five were unintended consequences of prior heart surgery.

Hagler used various forms of a device called the Amplatzer Occluder, manufactured past a Minnesota visitor, which consists of 2 discs connected by a thick shaft.

The device is threaded in collapsed form into the heart past a catheter and is opened at the site of the rupture in the ventricle walls. It is fabricated of flexible nitinol metal and covered with a polyester fabric. New heart tissue tin grow on this material, repairing the pigsty permanently.

Unless something is done to close the hole, blood shoots backward from the left to the right ventricle -- rather than into the body -- with each heartbeat, causing astringent heart failure.

However, the device effectively airtight the holes completely in viii of the x cases, Martinez reported.

According to Dr. Robert Beekman 3, co-managing director of the centre centre at Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center, a version of the device is at present the standard of care for a related heart trouble called "atrial septal defects" -- holes between the two upper chambers of the heart that tin can announced at birth. Beekman has implanted such devices in hundreds of children with congenital heart defects.

However, ventricular septal defects "are very unlike middle problems," Beekman said. The ventricular septal defect repair device used at the Mayo Dispensary remains experimental, he noted.

"There is a lot more morbidity and complications [with the ventricular trouble] than with atrial septal defect closure, so it is taking a lot more than time for the Food and Drug Administration to approve it," Beekman said.

The procedures done for the adult heart assault patients at the Mayo Clinic were all successful, Martinez said, although one patient died five days later of an illness unrelated to the ventricular septal defect patch. Surgery was afterwards performed successfully in the ii patients where the hole remained partially open up and in a 3rd patient in whom a bacterial infection developed months later. All three of the patients survived, the researchers said.

More than information

Septal defects and their treatment are described by the American Heart Association.

SOURCES: Matthew Westward. Martinez, M.D., cardiology boyfriend, Mayo Clinic, Rochester, Minn; Robert Beekman III, M.D., co-director, center centre, Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center; May 10, 2007, scientific sessions, Society for Cardiovascular Angiogrphy and Interventions, Orlando, Fla.

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