It's a perfect case of kindness and technology coming to the aid of two four month-old infants born with defective heart valves in the city.
Thanks to the courageous and noble act of parents of Sony, a 40-day-old brain-dead infant, in allowing the doctors to harvest the vital organs, Devi Priya and Sahil have received a fresh lease of life. Both the children, now around four-months old received the heart valves, harvested from Sony recently.
Doctors gave up hopes on Devi Priya and Sahil and gave them just about six months time. The parents of the two infants who visited various hospitals were crestfallen. But help came from the most unexpected quarters through Mohan foundation, which encourages organ donation. The retrieved organs were sent to the Homograft Heart Valve Replacement Bank at Innova Hospital, where they were harvested.
Homograft heart valve bank
“Retrieving heart valves and harvesting them is no mean task. The homograft [which means a graft from the same species] heart valve bank provides a sterile environment for retrieval. “Sterile conditions help avoid bacterial contamination. Heart valve of an adult will not be suitable for an infant because of the size,” says K.S. Murthy, CMD of Innova Children's Hospital.
“Till now we have done similar procedures on adults. This is the first time that the heart valves of an infant were harvested successfully and implanted in two infants,” Dr. Murthy says. There are only four heart valve banks in the Country.
“Chennai, Bangalore and Delhi have similar facilities. There is also a need to realise that organ donation among the brain-dead children is not frequent and it should be encouraged. Roughly, every year close to 20,000 children in our State are born with heart defects and not all are lucky,” Dr. Murthy points out.
The parents of the two lucky infants visited several hospitals but were unable to find a cure. “We are very lucky because many doctors gave us just six months for our children to survive,” recalls Pushpavathi and Alka, mothers of Devi Priya and Sahil respectively.
In addition to homografts, other types of valves, made up of metal, plastic and even animal based valves extracted from pigs are available in the market. “Homografts last longer compared to prosthetic valves. Those with prosthetic valves suffer from blood clotting and have to be put on anti-coagulants or blood thinning drugs for along time,” Dr. Murthy said.
