Tamil Nadu - Chennai

Open-heart surgery done on 40-day-old Iraqi child

By Our Staff Reporter

CHENNAI, MARCH 27. Ali Sami Saad, a 40-day-old Iraqi baby, has survived a congenital heart defect thanks to a team of cardiologists who corrected the defect surgically.

Open-heart surgery was done on the infant at the Madras Medical Mission hospital here last week. Next week lucky Ali would return to Hilla, a town about 100 km south of Baghdad, and would grow up as any normal child, doctors said.

The child turned blue every time he cried and would not feed. He suffered from transposition of great arteries. Pure blood circulated in the lungs while the body received impure blood. Normally, blood flows out of the heart into the lungs for oxygenation and returns to the heart and is circulated in the body.

Paediatric cardiologist Zuhair I Mahmood of Ibn al Bitar Centre for Cardiac Surgery in Baghdad diagnosed the problem and did emergency procedures to keep the baby alive.

At birth, even in normal babies, the wall separating the right and left atrium of the heart has a hole. Tissues maintain a link between the pulmonary artery, which takes blood from the heart to the lungs and the aorta, which supplies oxygenated blood to the body.

As a result despite abnormal conditions, a child can survive for three months. A few weeks after birth, the hole in dividing wall in the atrium closes and the main blood vessels evolve into separate passages. When this happens, it is difficult to operate and the child will die.

Dr. Mahmood prevented the closure of the wall but lacked the infrastructure to correct the condition.

Ali is the fourth child to his parents and his father is a blacksmith in Hilla. On March 18, in a six-hour surgery, paediatric cardiologists used the body tissues of the baby and arterial switch surgery was done. Ali has been put on a month-long medication.

Arterial switch surgery, which ensures complete correction, should be performed within four weeks of birth. This is the fifth such surgery at the Medical Mission hospital this year. Two children from Tamil Nadu, one each from Gujarat and Bahrain were operated for the same problem.

Dr. Mahmood said a few babies who were flown out of Iraq for arterial switch surgery did not survive. "There has been an increase in incidence of such congenital heart defects since the war last year," he said.

Cardiologist, A. Bhagyavathy, said children with such congenital heart defects would turn blue when they cried and would not feed.

The baby would be irritable because of poor oxygen supply to the brain. Such defects could now be detected in the foetus that would enable early planning of surgery. Planning was necessary because the baby's oxygen supply and feeding needed to be taken care of, she said.

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