NEW DELHI: Doctors at a leading private hospital in Delhi in a rare surgery have removed a left ventricular assist device (LVAD) from an Iraqi national after his ailing heart was found to have recovered completely, hospital authorities claimed on Tuesday, October 5, 2021. The surgery was done recently at Fortis hospital in Noida. Doctors at the facility claimed that so far, there were “only a few such cases which have been reported worldwide”.
The LVAD is a mechanical pump that is implanted inside a person’s chest to help a weakened heart pump blood. It was inserted in the patient, now 56, in 2018, after being diagnosed with terminal heart failure, the hospital said in a statement.
Dr Ajay Kaul, chairman, Fortis Heart and Vascular Institute, Noida, and his team of medical experts who performed the surgery in September, along with the patient, interacted with media persons on Tuesday. The patient was extremely breathless when he had first come to the hospital.
He could not do routine activities, like taking bath without help. Since no surgical procedure was possible, he was put on a heart transplant list. While waiting for the donor heart patient, his condition started deteriorating and became so critical that he required life-saving machines and it was decided to put him on an LVAD, the statement said.
The insertion of the LVAD in 2018 had gone well and the patient was discharged from the hospital after two weeks, and on follow-up, the doctors had found that the “heart support system was functioning well’, it said. He went back to his country and was asked to come for a follow-up every six months. He was doing very well, but after one-and-a-half-year, he developed a “driveline infection”, it added. “We tried to treat it, and during a routine check-up, we found that his heart had recovered completely,” the hospital claimed.