By IANS
Chennai : The cardiac team of a private hospital here claimed to have achieved a global first by simultaneously conducting a beating heart surgery and an angioplasty on a 57-year-old diabetic patient.
The doctors of Lifeline Multi-Specialty Hospital here performed the feat on a lady named Pushpa last month. The two operations have been performed within days or months of each other but never simultaneously, J.S. Rajkumar, chairman of the hospital, said at a press conference here Thursday.
The achievement means that patients with cardiac problems who need to be addressed only by dissecting the breast bone and consequent open-heart surgeries have a viable alternative so effective that they can return to normalcy within 48 hours of the operation.
Pushpa’s arteries on both sides of her heart were blocked and her being a diabetic had posed serious problems. Doctors Ravi Kumar and Nand Kishore Kapadia solved this tricky situation by creating a tiny incision below the heart (without cutting any bone) and a keyhole through the thighs and performed the operation in six and half hours.
This new treatment means that one can permanently avoid complications that arise out of conventional bypass surgeries and the recurring aches due to the grafting of bone and tissue.
Kapadia said that this treatment was likely to cost a little under Rs.15,000 more than the conventional bypass surgeries.
“But with this price tag, one gets comfort, near absence of pain and there are no other lurking dangers usually attributed to bypass surgeries,” Rajkumar said.