Ludhiana, December 15
Contrary to certain press reports, redo bypass surgery on the beating heart is a common procedure and the cardiac surgeons here have been performing it with a remarkable success for quite some time now.
The team of cardiac surgeons at Hero DMC Heart Institute (HDHI) today claimed that they had performed redo beating heart coronary artery bypass graft (CABG) in four cases and the first such operation was done in February, 2004.
Dr H.S. Bedi, another pioneer in beating heart surgery, who is at present with Ludhiana Medicity Hospital, said he had performed the first redo beating heart CABG way back in 2000 and the case was duly reported in international journals and presented in the Annual Conference of the European Association for Cardio-Thoracic Surgery at Frankfurt (Germany) in October, 2000.
Addressing a news conference here today, Dr V.K. Sharma, Head, Department of Cardiac Surgery at HDHI, informed that the first redo beating heart bypass operation was performed on a 60-year-old NRI from Canada in February, 2004. The first such successful surgery was repeated on an 84-year-old patient from Jalandhar in November, 2004. Thereafter, a 50-year-old local resident was operated upon in June, 2005 followed by redo beating heart surgery on a 60-year-old patient from Abohar in July this year.
Dr Sharma further claimed that in all these four CABG procedures were total arterial revascularisation, which had a longer life in comparison to venal graft. The various grafts used in these operations were left and right internal mammary arteries, both radial arteries and right gastroepiploeic artery and all the patients, routinely being followed up on a regular basis, were doing extremely well.
He said redo bypass surgery constituted about 2 percent of all CABG procedures in India while the corresponding figure in UK was around 5 percent and between 10 to 20 percent in USA, which went on to show that the procedure was not that uncommon in India and elsewhere in the world.
“Since the year 2002, about 1300 open heart operations have been performed at HDHI, out of which around 1000 were bypass procedures. The team of cardiac surgeons at this institute performed nearly 99 per cent of these surgeries on beating heart and in almost all these cases, at least one arterial graft, most commonly the left internal mammary artery (LIMA) was used.”
Other members of the HDHI cardiac surgery team - Dr D.P. Marik, Dr Sarju Ralhan and Dr Sunil Dawka, who were also present at the occasion, made an audio-visual presentation of beating heart surgery, using arterial grafts.
