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| Clinic for Cardiology |
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25th October 2003
High Tech: New potential for sick hearts
- Unblocking arteries
- Closing holes
- Repairing valves
- Correcting heart rhythm
...and all without surgery!
Cardiac interventions are becoming increasingly gentle. In many cases surgeons no longer have to open up the chest with a large incision. Instead they use a catheter, which is pushed up to the heart through a tiny incision in the groin. Prof. Dieter Horstkotte, MD, (Photo) is an expert in this field. Contrast medium is injected into a cardiac catheter. The location of the catheter during the intervention then shows up on an X-ray and can be monitored. The X-ray machine used can be seen behind Prof. Horstkotte in the photo.
Catheter instead of scalpel
Silke Tamburini has learnt to laugh again. “Just two years ago”, remembers the 35-year old from Peine in Lower Saxony, “I couldn’t laugh at all. I couldn’t breathe.”
Silke Tamburini has a serious disease: Her heart is so worn out that the ventricles cannot pump enough blood into her circulatory system. “Sometimes I could hardly stand up”, Tamburini says. The young woman kept suffering from shortness of breath and fluid retention in her legs. Three years ago the doctors at the Heart and Diabetes Center NRW in Bad Oeynhausen proposed a heart transplantation.
“But at the time I didn’t have the strength, physically or mentally”, Tamburini tells us.
The doctors found an option that would be less dramatic. Since the Summer of 2001 a special cardiac pacemaker has been at work inside her chest, coordinating the function of her weak heart. The result of this pulser therapy (called resynchronization): Her heart is able to pump effectively once more.
“Today”, enthuses Tamburini, “I can go inline skating every day”. But her new level of fitness is not solely due to the pacemaker; the patient also has to take a whole range of medication. It remains to be seen whether the pulser will save Silke Tamburini from a heart transplantation permanently. For Prof. Dieter Horstkotte, MD, Direktor of the Clinic for Cardiology at the Bad Oeynhausen Center, one thing is clear: “Resynchronization represents a further success story in the history of interventional cardiology.”
This specialist term refers to a technique for treating heart patients which – unlike traditional surgery –requires hardly any incision: Using tiny tubes (catheters), often no thicker than two millimeters, doctors access patients’ sick hearts via the arteries.
Once at the heart, a growing number of interventions can then be performed. Whereas the primary use for this technique used to be the unblocking of hardened arteries (200 000 times p.a. in Germany alone), nowadays even heart valve defects can be repaired in this way, dysrhythmia eliminated and congenital heart defects corrected.
“Interventional cardiology”, so Horstkotte believes, “will be used to solve an increasing number of problems which to date could only be addressed using surgery”. The only thing left by the intervention is a tiny scar, usually in the groin area, sometimes on the collar-bone.
Four examples of how far our cardiac catheter specialists have progressed are presented below.
(Taken and translated from: Apotheken Umschau, 15th October 2003)
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