Baby Came Heart Attack Doctors Rescued Child With Bypass Op

Heart Attack: Doctors save baby by bypass surgery
Specialists at the German Heart Center in Munich have achieved a medical brilliance. In a complicated and worldwide rare bypass surgery, the doctors were able to save the life of little Maxim. The boy had suffered a severe heart attack at the age of three months and would have had to live without the surgery for only about half a year. Now the child could celebrate his first birthday together with his family.

First infarction already shortly after birth
At the age of three months, Maxim, who is only three months old, suffers a severe heart attack - the second in his previously short life. But through a special bypass operation, doctors at the German Heart Center in Munich were able to save the boy's life. The procedure is considered extremely difficult and has been rarely performed until then.

Extremely difficult operation succeeded in baby with heart attack. Picture: hywards - fotolia

"That's why there are hardly any empirical values ​​and virtually no literature. But we just had to try it. Otherwise Maxim would not have survived. So we are all the happier that he has made it now ", said the head physician Professor Rüdiger Lange according to the channel" Radio Arabella ". Accordingly, the boy would probably have died without the operation after about half a year, because his heart function was only ten percent, Professor Rüdiger Lange continues.

Left coronary artery falsely originates from the pulmonary artery
The boy was born with a rare heart defect in Russia and had been operated on shortly after birth as a result of a first heart attack. But his condition remained poor, as it turned out, his left coronary artery did not come from the main artery, but from the pulmonary artery. However, as oxygenated blood flows here, the left heart muscle did not get enough oxygen. Three months after the first procedure, there was a second heart attack, which the boy survived only through the rapid recovery of his father.

"Thank God we found him early that morning and my husband was able to resuscitate him," continues 29-year-old mother Ekatherina P. The parents sought help from three renowned cardiac centers in Germany. However, since the required operation is extremely complicated, it was difficult to find someone who dared to carry it out. Finally, they came in contact with Professor Rüdiger Lange, who agreed to take the step. A big challenge because "the heart of a baby is only as big as a walnut. The coronary arteries are tiny. The inner thoracic artery, which we have sewn to the left coronary artery as a bypass, only has a diameter of 0.8 millimeters, "explains Lange.

Sutures as thin as a hair
Through a six-hour bypass operation, the doctors were able to restore the blood supply to the heart muscle and thereby save the life of the eleven-month-old infant. For this purpose, they used needles and threads matched to the small patient, which corresponds to 0.05 millimeters of the thickness of a human hair. After the surgery, the boy had to be put into an artificial coma for ten days to regenerate, according to the report of the radio station.

"Until his small and severely weakened heart could recover, we temporarily had to attach him to an artificial heart. These were very critical phases. [...] But now our little patient is finally on the mend. We are very happy about that, "says Senior Consultant Lange. (No)