Chennai:Ā Apollo Hospitals has successfully performed a redilatable stent implantation procedure giving a new lease of life to a pre-term boy baby here.
The baby was one of the pre-term twins who were delivered at another private hospital in city at 30 weeks gestation and only weighed 1.5 kg. He was brought to Apollo Children’s hospital in May with severe breathing difficulty which was later identified as heart failure. Further diagnosis at the hospital revealed that the baby had developed severe coarctation (narrowing) of aorta, a potentially dangerous heart defect that restrict the amount of blood being pumped around the body. The child required immediate surgical intervention to stabilize, however, the risk was much higher as the baby was underweight, a press release said.
Apollo Children’s Hospitals pediatric interventional cardiologist, Dr C S Muthukumaran and his team performed a challenging procedure where the obstruction was balloon dilated (enlarged) where a small coronary balloon was inserted through the femoral artery and the enlargement was done. This procedure restored blood supply to the baby’s legs immediately. The patient recovered and was discharged.
Observation after four months revealed that the child had developed an obstruction again in his aorta. Muthukumaran, and team used a novel technique of implanting a stent called Cooks Formula stent through the femoral artery (artery for lower limb) that relieved the obstruction completely. The Cooks Formula stent is a redilatable stent that can be dilated as the artery grows in size over the years, the release said.
Speaking about the procedure, Muthukumaran said, “Traditionally surgery is the only route to correct a coarctation but this new stent technique can help pre-term and infants to recover from such issues without surgery. Now, the baby is five months post stent implantation and doing well. This is the first time a small redilatable stent has been implanted in a pre-term baby.”