By ESTHER COVINGTO
Surgeons at the University of Utah Hospital have successfully completed a new technique in single bypass heart surgery that accesses the heart between the ribs instead of through the chest.
S.V. Karwande, M.D., associate professor and chief of the division of cardiothoracic surgery at the University of Utah school of medicine, said the procedure has been around for a long time but has just recently been used at the U of U hospital.
'This technique has been resuscitated within the past year. Doctors were hesitant to use it previously because they thought it was easier to sew in a heart that's not beating than to work on a beating one,' Karwande said.
According to a news release from the U of U Health Sciences Center, the new technique, used for single bypasses only, has four advantages to the old method, which involved opening the entire chest cavity.
The first is the new technique does not require the use of the heart-lung bypass machine.
'We use drugs to slow down the beating heart which lets us do the surgery. The drugs stop the heart just long enough (5-15 seconds) for us to complete the procedure,' Karwande said.
The breathing tube is removed immediately after surgery.
Second, the new technique does not require the removal of a vein from the leg, used to bypass the blocked coronary artery, which was standard with the old procedure.
With the new technique, the surgeons make a six-inch incision just above the heart and remove a small piece of rib. Karwande said the removed rib is cartilage and will not harm the patient.
Once inside the chest, the surgeons cut the internal mammary artery and connect it to the coronary artery.
'Because the new technique is easier and less invasive, the patient recovers much quicker and experiences less pain than with the traditional approach,' Karwande said.
Last, Karwande said the surgery takes from one to two hours, and requires no blood transfusions.
'The new technique is permanent. Before this technique, patients requiring a single bypass were given angioplasty. Many of these patients had to have it again, but with this new procedure, 97 percent of the patients never have to have another bypass,' Karwande said.
In addition, Karwande said this procedure is less expensive than traditional bypass surgery. Karwande said this is because the surgery does not use machines