Hyderabad: A specialised team of cardiac surgeons at the CARE Hospital, Banjara Hills successfully performed a rare beating heart surgery. According to the treating doctors, this condition diagnosed on the 45-year old patient Mohd Qutubuddin from Hyderabad, is seen in only 1% of all patients with chest deformities. The patient was admitted to the hospital having a front side chest deformity since birth, in which his upper part of chest (sternum and adjacent costal cartilages) was protruding out (Pectus Carinatum) and the lower part of chest (sternum and costal cartilages) was sunken deep inside (Pectus Excavatum).
According to Dr Prateek Bhatnagar, Director of Cardiac Surgery, CARE Hospitals Banjarahills, this was a medically challenging case. “Worldwide, there is limited medical literature available on handling of such patients,” he said, explaining that in the case of this particular patient, he and his team of doctors performed the life-saving procedure through an extremely narrow passage in the chest.
According to him, “The patient was diagnosed with severe mixed chest deformity and had to get a multi-vessel coronary bypass surgery, as he was having angina even at rest and angiography showed left main with multi-vessel disease. This was a rare situation because in such a chest deformity, bypass surgeries have very little space for the conduct of operation. Beating all odds, we performed the surgery without any blood transfusion.”
After assessing the patient’s condition in detail, Dr Bhatnagar devised the surgical strategy to perform this complex operation. Because of the extreme space reduction in Currarino -Silverman chest deformity, manipulating the heart during the surgery becomes very difficult, he explained, adding that due to the crooked nature of the breast bone (sternum), retraction of this bone to harvest internal mammary arteries (IMAs), using routine techniques during a bypass surgery becomes impossible.
“We are currently verifying from medical literature if this has been the first ever such case wherein the patient has been successfully operated upon. Post the surgery, the patient is recovering well. The patient was walking independently within 24 hours of bypass surgery,” Dr. Bhatnagar said.
