City-based Kovai Medical Centre and Hospital (KMCH) recently transplanted a donor heart in a 45-year-old patient, but without removing his defunct heart. Surgeons placed the donor heart on the right side of the chest cavity in a procedure known as heterotopic heart transplantion.
Normally, a diseased or defunct heart is removed and replaced with the donor heart (orthotopic procedure), the heterotopic procedure keeps it in its original place and provides space for the new one that will provide fresh lease of life for the patient.
Prashanth Vaijyanath, Director of Cardio-thoracic Surgery at KMCH, led the transplantation on May 30 and the team also consisted Thomas Alexander, Suresh Kumar and Vivek Path.
According to the team, the heterotopic procedure was chosen as the patient had high lung pressure that ruled out normal heart transplantation. They said that the patient’s original heart was only 10 % functional. What further enabled the heterotopic option was that the donor heart (of a woman) was of a smaller size and it fit perfectly into the thoracic cavity on the right side.
As the result of the procedure done, both hearts are connected in five ways. While two connections are meant to take in the pure blood the other three will take the impure blood out.
