Congential Heart Disease: On February 7th, 2007 at 7:00 pm, the Montefiore-Einstein Heart Center in New York City, NY, will present an OR Live webcast of a panel discussion about a repair of an anomalous coronary artery off the pulmonary artery (ALCAPA) on a ten-year-old girl.
This procedure was performed on December 11, 2006 by Samuel Weinstein, MD, director of Pediatric Cardiothoracic Surgery at the Children's Hospital at Montefiore. The panel discussion will be moderated by Robert Michler, MD, chairman of the Department of Cardiothoracic Surgery at Montefiore, and a panel of other experts including Dr. Weinstein. They will be joined by a live audience of surgeon-colleagues and cardiologists. The webcast will feature video portions of the procedure as well as detailed descriptions of the techniques used.
If undetected, this congenital defect can result in death in up to 90% of patients within the first year of life. In this particular case, the child developed enough collateral blood flow to the heart to reach the age of 10.
“This particular girl is an interesting case in that she’s ten years old. Ninety percent of children with this defect will die if undiagnosed within the first year of life. For whatever reason, she was able to develop an extra amount of extra blood sources to her left heart through what we would call collateral vessels, and she survived to be ten years of age,” said Dr Weinstein.
Due to the difficult location of the artery, an intrapulmonary artery baffle was required to redirect oxygenated blood into the vessel from the aorta through an aortopulmonary window. This technique is called the Takeuchi repair.
Dr. Weinstein explained, “Because the vessel itself came off so far away from the aorta, we had to create a tunnel inside the aorta to the pulmonary artery bringing the red oxygenated blood over to that vessel.”
The patient has since been discharged and is doing well postoperatively.
Montefiore-Einstein Heart Center has recruited a team of world-renown physicians and surgeons, headed by co-directors Richard Kitsis, MD, and Robert E. Michler, MD. Currently, any cardiac procedure that is offered anywhere in the world can also be performed at Montefiore-Einstein Heart Center — from transplant to minimally invasive and robotics.
© 2008 Montefiore Medical Center