The Hindu : Tamil Nadu / Chennai News : Infant undergoes rare surgery

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Saturday, Apr 22, 2006

Tamil Nadu

Tamil Nadu - Chennai

Infant undergoes rare surgery

Staff Reporter

He suffered from congenital heart disease 1-year-old boy suffered from congenital heart disease

CHENNAI: A team of surgeons at the Institute of Child Health, Egmore, has performed a surgery on a one-year-old boy who suffered from a rare congenital heart disease.

Balamurugan, the second child of Iyyanar and Devi, hailing from an economically backward agrarian family in Madurai, was born with an Aorto-Pulmonary Window.

This led to the mixing of pure and impure blood coursing through the aorta and pulmonary artery.

Doctors said that while 6-8 newborns per thousand suffered from some form of congenital heart disease, the incidence of this particular disorder was between 0.1 to 0.3 per cent in the world.

This was the first such case treated at the ICH.

In a patient with this condition the communication between the aorta and the pulmonary artery allows the oxygenated blood to flow from the aorta back into the pulmonary artery and mingle with the unoxygenated (blue) blood.

The child had complaints of repeated respiratory infections, delayed development, breathing difficulty and poor weight gain.

The parents took it to various hospitals. They could ill afford the the surgery cost of Rs. 1.50 lakh and were advised to consult the ICH.

During the two-hour surgery performed at the ICH on April 10, the team of surgeons — P. Moorthy, J. Sivakumar and S. Sivasubramaniam — performed a closure of the defect, which was as large as 1.2 cm diameter in the child weighing hardly 5 kg.

Surgeons also closed an atrial septal defect, commonly known as a `hole in the heart'.

The team of anaesthetists comprised Soundara Pandiyan, Suresh Prabhakarakumar and P. Maheswari.

According to Dr. Moorthy, consanguineous marriages, use of certain drugs during pregnancy and exposure to radiation, were known to cause such conditions.

Ideally, the condition should be surgically corrected in the first three to six months after birth, said Dr. Sivakumar.

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