A father-daughter duo from the city had performed a bypass surgery on a heart tilted abnormally, making the rare procedure arguably the first of its kind.
The procedure has been detailed in a paper published in the upcoming July issue of Annals of Thoracic Surgery.
Prateek Bhatnagar and his team at Sunshine Hospitals, including his daughter Subhi Bhatnagar, performed the surgery in September 2016, on a 52-year-old city man who suffered a heart attack in Ajmer.
On running diagnostics, doctors discovered the man’s heart was twisted, with major chambers of the organ pointing towards the back, and not front as in the case of a normal heart. The condition, termed Mesocardia, is believed to be so rare that it affects only two out of a lakh people.
No reference point
“When we wanted to operate on the patient, we did not find anything in medical literature that described a bypass procedure on such a heart. We opted to perform a Y-graft procedure on the heart without stopping it,” said Dr. Bhatnagar.
He explained a Y-graft involves the use of internal mammary arteries, and not the aorta, to supply blocked vessels of the heart. This choice of procedure, the surgeon says, allows performing a bypass on a heart in any position.
A year after the surgery, imaging showed the grafts in the patient were functioning effectively, the doctors found.
“We have detailed the procedure in the hope that it now can help surgeons across the world. Earlier, such patients were not being operated as it was not known just a bypass can be performed on such hearts,” Dr. Bhatnagar added.
