MITERA Children’s Hospital: New innovative cardiac valve implantation technique without bypass surgery
A new innovative valve implantation technique was recently applied through cardiac catheterization by a team of Pediatric Cardiologists, Pediatric Cardiac Surgeons and Pediatric Cardiac Anesthetists at HYGEIA Group’s MITERA Children’s Hospital and HYGEIA Hospital.
The procedure was successfully performed on a 17-year-old patient who had already undergone two open-heart operations abroad. The patient suffered from severe stenosis of the implanted prosthetic tricuspid valve, which had been placed during a previous operation. He suffered from severe dyspnea and fluid retention.
The new valve implanted is called “Melody valve” and it has been used in the past few years mainly in patients requiring pulmonary valve replacement.
This is the first time that this valve is being implanted in Greece in the position of the tricuspid valve and is amongst the very few such cases worldwide.
Dr Aphrodite Tzifa, Chief of Interventional Paediatric Cardiology at MITERA Children’s Hospital, who was in charge of the team that performed the operation, reported: “Due to the patient’s severely impaired clinical status, it was deemed safer to treat the disease with cardiac catheterization and not a third open-heart surgery, which would have been significantly riskier. Post-operative assessment manifested immediate return of the tricuspid valve function to normal. The patient recovery was very speedy with return to his daily activities within two days from the operation. We are hoping that with the new percutaneous techniques, more patients with congenital or acquired heart disease will be able to avoid high-risk surgery.”
The Paediatric Cardiology and Paediatric Cardiac Surgery Department have been operating at the MITERA Children’s Hospital and HYGEIA Hospital for the past four years, specializing in all types of congenital heart disease in children and adults. They have demonstrated high success rates, which are comparable to the best departments internationally. The operative outcomes have been recently certified by the Association for European Pediatric Cardiology.
The innovative procedure was performed by a team of Physicians at MITERA Children’s and HYGEIA Hospitals, which consisted of Dr A. Tzifa, Dr I. Papagiannis, Paediatric Cardiologists; Dr Chrysocheris, Adult Cardiologist; Dr G. Sarris, Director of the Cardiac Surgery Department for Congenital Heart Disease and Dr Kyrvasilis, Director of the Pediatric Cardiac Anesthesia Department.