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Tri-state Hospital, Lekki, has successfully carried out complicated open heart surgery on a 13-day-old baby. The unnamed baby was born with a rare congenital abnormality of the heart known in medical parlance as “transposition of the great arteries”.
In layman’s terms, the two major arteries leaving the baby’s heart were transposed (wrongly connected) to the lower chambers of the heart (ventricles).
Saturday Vanguard gathered that the life-saving procedure, known as an “arterial switch operation” – a complex type of pediatric cardiothoracic surgery, lasted 19 hours, and was carried out by a Nigerian team of specialists. Only the most skilled paediatric surgeons in the world are known to carry out the procedure successfully.
The medical team was led by Professor Kamar Adeleke, a professor of medicine/cardiology, interventional cardiologist, and the Founder/CEO, of Tristate Healthcare system – a conglomeration of best-in-class super-specialty healthcare providers.
Speaking on the medical feat, Adeleke, who is the President/CEO, Tristate Cardiovascular Institute, and Chief, Division of Cardiac Catheterization and Interventional Laboratory, University College Hospital, Ibadan, Oyo State, said the arterial switch operation is an open-heart procedure that is done within two weeks of life or it will be too late.
He explained that as a result of the abnormality, blood containing oxygen from the baby’s lungs was being pumped back into the lungs, while blood that lacks oxygen was pumped throughout the body.
“We did an arterial switch in a 13- day- old baby. Normally, the heart has two sides; the right side takes in blood from the organs of the body. This blood is devoid of nutrients, and from here the blood is pumped into the lungs where it is oxygenated and purified and then transported into the left side of the heart where it is pumped to all parts of the body.
“This baby was born with a badly structured heart. What happened to this baby was that the left and right structures were switched, so the baby was not getting any purification of the blood. The mortality of this condition is 100 percent.
“What we did was to restructure the heart in addition to a bypass. All the blood vessels coming from the wrong sides were correctly repositioned. It was a complex surgery that took from 10.15 in the morning till 5 am the following day.
