A congenital heart disease, two open heart surgeries and a failed bioprosthetic valve — for 24-year-old Ashwin, a third open heart surgery was the last thing he wanted. So doctors of the Frontier Lifeline Hospital managed to replace the failed bioprosthetic valve through a minimally invasive technology recently.
A team of doctors — Rajaram Anantharaman and Raghavan Subramanian under the supervision of K.M. Cherian, chairman and CEO of Frontier Lifeline Hospital — performed a transcatheter pulmonary valve implantation (TPVI) on Mr. Ashwin, a software engineer. They claimed this was South India’s first TPVI.
The patient had a congenital heart disease, and underwent the first open heart surgery as a two-and-a-half-year-old child in 1997. He had the second surgery for severe pulmonary regurgitation and received a bioprosthetic surgical valve when he was aged 12, doctors said.
“Persons with congenital heart diseases need to undergo multiple cardiac surgeries. The bioprosthetic valve started to re-narrow. Conventionally, valve replacements were done through open heart surgeries. But a lot has changed since the advent of transcatheter valve implantation in 2000. We did the procedure for pulmonary valve implantation for this young patient,” Dr. Anantharaman, senior consultant, Cardiology, and lead of the transcatheter valve therapy unit of the hospital told reporters on Saturday. The procedure was done at St. Gregorious Cardio Vascular Centre, Kerala. Post-procedure, the patient was able to walk in 18 hour sand was discharged after 48 hours.