Going to great lengths to give a new lease of life

March 05, 2015 12:00 am | Updated 05:49 am IST - VIJAYAWADA:

The miracles of modern medicine are many. A person is drained off all blood until he is declared “clinically dead” to give him a new lease of life. This is exactly what a team of surgeons did to Goguli Kumar, 21, a Bihari construction worker.

Andhra Hospitals Heart and Brain Institute surgeons used Deep Hypothermic Circulatory Arrest (DHCA) technique to cool Mr. Kumar’s body and bring his blood circulation to a stop and repair a tear on his aortic arch.

DHCA makes it possible to keep the patient in a state of hibernation at 12-18 degrees Centigrade with no breathing, heartbeat or brain activity for up to one hour. Blood is drained from the body to eliminate all blood pressure. The patient is considered ‘clinically dead’ during the operation. The technique provides excellent operating conditions while reducing damage to organs, caused by oxygen or glucose shortage, which occurs when there is no blood flow.

Cardio-thoracic surgeon Dilip Kumar Ratti said that the patient had a rent/tear on the aortic arch, the huge blood vessel that leaves the heart. If the sternum (breast bone) was opened without the stopping of circulation the patient would have lost three litres of blood in a minute and have died on the operation table and there was nothing anyone could have done about it, he said. Mr. Goguli Kumar got a new lease of life because of DHCA, he said.

DHCA was actually an old technique used a lot before the development of the Cardiopulmonary bypass (CPB). In CPB the blood circulation system is disconnected from the heart and hooked on to a heart-lung machine which both pumped and oxygenated the blood during the operation.

Even Goguli Kumar was on a CPB, but since the area that needed to be repaired was the aortic arch the blood flow had to be totally stopped, Dr Dilip Kumar explained. Andhra Hospitals group chairman and managing director P.V. Ramana Murthy said that the expanses for the complex procedure were borne by the hospital on humanitarian grounds.

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