A groundbreaking medical advancement looks to save the lives of hundreds of thousands of Americans
New strategy for procedures that once required open-heart surgery is the latest use of scientific technology to provide hope in medicine
Photo courtesy of MART PRODUCTION/Pexels
Approximately 500,000 Americans undergo an open-heart surgery per year, yet heart disease remains “the leading cause of death for men and women in the United States,” as per Brown University Health. However, in a promising scientific development, researchers and doctors at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the Emory School of Medicine have used a new, minimally invasive strategy to “successfully [perform] a coronary artery bypass – a normally open-heart surgery – without cutting the chest wall,” according to NIH.
Johns Hopkins Medicine explains the left coronary artery—which the recent patient experienced the new procedure on—as an “artery [which] sends blood to the left side of the heart muscle. This includes the left ventricle and left atrium. It divides” other arteries, sending blood to other parts of the heart. The patient’s aortic valve “had previously been replaced by a bioprosthetic, but, due to calcium buildup, the replacement now needed replacing. However, this patient’s unique anatomy placed the opening, or ostium, of his left coronary artery so close to the valve that its life-sustaining blood flow would likely become blocked during the standard valve replacement procedure,” the NIH elaborated.
Instead of attempting to perform extremely risky—and possibly life-ending—open-heart surgery, researchers successfully used minimally invasive catheters to make “a new route for blood flow,” as further explained by NIH, preventing the patient from having to undergo the surgery, while still receiving the necessary life-saving care. These groundbreaking doctors and researchers “included Emory [School of Medicine] cardiovascular surgeons Adam Greenbaum, MD and Valis Babliaros, MD as well as Christopher Bruce, MBChB, adjunct professor of cardiology at Emory School of Medicine and Robert Lederman, MD, from the Laboratory of Cardiovascular Intervention at the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute, a part of the NIH,” as documented by Emory Healthcare.
The NIH further explained, “With VECTOR, the researchers pass a wire through the aorta and into the at-risk coronary artery. From there, they steer the wire deep into one of the artery’s branches, breaching the vessel into the right ventricle, one of the heart’s four chambers. There, they operate a separate catheter to ensnare that wire and then pull the wire’s end out through the femoral vein.”
NIH reported that “Six months after the procedure, the patient showed no signs of coronary artery obstruction, meaning VECTOR’s first outing in a human proved to be a success.” Scientists are not done here; there are still further goals to expand VECTOR’s capability in more life-saving heart procedures. Doctor Valis Babliaros, from the Emory School of Medicine, said of the success, “We want to offer hope for those who have no hope,” as quoted by Emory Healthcare.
This newly discovered strategy to offer less invasive heart care is an impressive example of medical advancements; “Up to now,” as Powers Health notes, “even the least invasive heart bypass techniques have involved cutting into the chest between the ribs, pushing apart muscles and removing bone so surgeons can reach the bypass site.” Even as The Cleveland Clinic has documented that mortality rates of adults undergoing heart procedures has “substantially trended downward” in recent years, this new pioneering of medical technology hopes to, and is proving to be able to, make heart surgery even less life-threatening for the hundreds of thousands of patients per year which require these procedures.