Heart surgery without scars

Paediatric cardiologist Dr Lungile Pepeta believes an innovative procedure could render open heart surgery a thing of the past.

He added that it radically reduces the time children with heart defects have to wait to get into hospital - and the time they have to spend in hospital recovering.

Open-heart surgeries require that children be hospitalised for at least a week, but Pepeta's method would limit that time to one night, with almost no risk of infection or blood clots.

Yesterday, Pepeta and his team, Dr Adele Greyling and Dr Fanie Smit, performed two procedures at the Cardiovascular Laboratory at Port Elizabeth's ProvincialHospital.

They closed a hole in the heart of a five-year-old girl within 40 minutes, and measured the size of the hole in a 10-year-old boy's heart.

Pepeta said: "We usually advise parents to have these little defects fixed before the kids go to school as sometimes we only find out when someone collapses on the rugby field and turns blue in the face."

In congenital heart defects, oxygen-rich blood mixes with oxygen-poor blood in the heart - a potentially fatal cocktail if left untreated.

Pepeta said: "This procedure is done by implanting a small device into the heart that closes the hole. The device is made of a metal with shape memory characteristics and will return to its original shape after it is stretched to pass through a catheter. It has been designed to stop blood flowing through a hole in the heart."

Patients are given an anaesthetic and a catheter containing the device is inserted into the heart of the patient through the groin.

Pepeta explained that they can, and have done, the procedure on children as young as two months.

Pepeta has performed 84 of these procedures in the past 12 months.

"On average, these procedures take about one to two hours.

"Previously, children needed open-heart surgery to fix this problem. This is very traumatic for the kids and it leaves scars. It takes several hours, the children have to be placed on bypass and they have to stay in the hospital for a week."

He said the waiting list for cardiothoracic surgery can be up to 200 cases, and he hoped that the new procedure would ease the strain on the cardiothoracic team.

EXTRA-HEAD OP

Surgeons in Afghanistan have carried out a life-saving operation on a baby girl born with an extra head, doctors and relatives said yesterday.

The girl - named Asree Gul (new flower) and one of a pair of twins - was admitted to a hospital in the eastern city of Jalalabad with an extra head attached to her scalp, chief surgeon Ahmad Obaid Mojadidi said.

"Her mother gave birth to twins, two girls. One girl was in good health but the other had an abnormality. She had an extra head attached to her head," Mojadidi said.

"We separated the extra head from her body," he said, a week after the operation which he described as the most sophisticated ever carried out in the impoverished city.

He said, however, that the baby was not in good health after the op. - Sapa-AFP