Krasnoyarsk cardiac surgeons saved a girl with “adult” heart disease

Surgeons at the Federal Cardiac Center of Krasnoyarsk successfully performed an operation on a child with heart disease.

In the press service Federal Center for Cardiovascular Surgery of Krasnoyarsk said that the operation was performed urgently, since the risk of death was extremely high and the girl could have died at any moment. During a routine medical examination, doctors at a local clinic discovered a heart pathology in a one-year-old girl. To clarify the diagnosis, the baby was sent to the Krasnoyarsk Cardiac Center.

“After an examination, pediatric cardiologists made a diagnosis of hypertrophic cardiomyopathy with a life-threatening gradient in the left ventricular outflow tract up to 100 mm Hg. Art. due to thickening of the heart septum. At the same time, severe mitral valve insufficiency has already developed,” the cardio center clarified.

According to the head of the children's department of the medical institution, Pavel Teplov, this disease rarely occurs in children, so each such case is unique.

“Evgeniy Krivoshchekov, who now works in Kaliningrad, has the greatest experience in such operations on children in our country. This is the other end of the country, and we didn’t have time to wait. Fortunately, Evgeniy Vladimirovich is one of my teachers, and, among other things, I took over this operation from him. In addition, colleagues from the adult department of our Center have extensive experience in the surgical treatment of hypertrophic cardiomyopathy. So we carried out the operation together with the head of the department of chemical and chemical organization No. 3, Dmitry Buyankov. After performing a myectomy—tissue excision and release of the left ventricle of the heart—we performed a revision of the mitral valve. It turned out that the child also had a congenital heart defect – a split in the anterior leaflet of the mitral valve, so they also performed valve surgery,” noted Pavel Teplov.

The operation was successful. The next day, the child was transferred to his mother in the general ward, and a week later he was sent home.

Hypertrophic cardiomyopathy (HCM) is a disease in which the walls of the heart, especially the left ventricle, become too thick. Because of this, it is more difficult for the heart to work: it cannot fully fill with blood and pump it throughout the body. Most often, HCM is inherited – a child can receive a “broken” gene from one of the parents, while there are several types of genes that cause HCM and the prognosis can be different. This gene is responsible for the functioning of proteins in the heart muscle. External factors such as stress and nutrition do not cause HCM, but can affect the overall health of the child.