Rare heart procedure on septuagenarian

BENGALURU: In the last five years, heart surgeries have come a long way from prolonged hospitalisations, time-consuming procedures and long recovery to procedures that don’t last more than an hour and recovery is immediate. 

Take the case of a 70-year-old woman with severe aortic stenosis (AS), who, weighing at 115 kg, was unfit for surgery. She not only underwent a complex heart procedure, but also recovered in a jiffy, thanks to doctors of Bhagwan Mahaveer Jain Hospital, Vasanthnagar, who, in their first, conducted a transcatheter aortic valve implantation (TAVI) on her last week.  

“We accessed the heart of the patient from the groin through the femoral artery using a wire on which we had placed a TAVI valve to manoeuvre it to the heart. Once the valve was placed in perfect position, we did an angiography to ascertain the position. In simple terms, it was like an angioplasty procedure conducted to replace the old valve,” explained Dr Yogesh Kothari, senior interventional cardiologist and electrophysiologist. 

The patient was conscious throughout the procedure, which lasted an hour. She was discharged on the third day. She will come to the hospital for regular follow-ups like any other heart patient, he added.Severe aortic stenosis is a condition due to obstruction of blood flow across the aortic valve because of pathological narrowing.

TAVI is a minimally invasive procedure and is conducted under local anaesthesia unlike surgical aortic valve replacement (SAVR), in which the diseased aortic valve is replaced through open heart surgery.