Heart Bypass Without Surgery
May 28 -- Undergoing a typical bypass operation today is major surgery.
The surgeon opens the patient's chest and sometimes needs to stop the heart temporarily, and rely on a machine to pump the blood through the body during the procedure.
The whole operation is so invasive, it takes a patient more than a month to recover.
But now, there is a new development that could reduce the recovery time to just a few days.
According to a special report released in Tuesday's Circulation, a journal of the American Heart Association, a new procedure will be able to offer a non-surgical alternative, which transforms a coronary vein into a coronary artery to bypass a blockage.
The new procedure, called percutaneous in-situ coronary venous arterialization, or PICVA, is done in a lab, where the patient is given only a local anesthetic and is able to watch— versus the current method that requires the patient to be unconscious.
The study patient, a 53-year-old German man named Bernd Lauer, is now the first person to undergo the experimental treatment after suffering chest pains from a severely blocked artery. The artery was almost completely blocked, in fact, which rejected his candidacy for bypass surgery or angioplasty.
Much Simpler: Using Existing Veins
The traditional way to get around a blocked artery is to take a vein from elsewhere in the body, often the leg, and attach it to the artery to "bypass" the problem area.
What makes this experimental procedure so much simpler is that it uses veins already in place on the heart.
"The veins have largely been ignored, but they turn out to be parallel to the arteries and free of disease," says Dr. Stephen Oesterle, the director of invasive cardiology services at Massachusetts General Hospital and associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, who successfully conducted the surgery in November 1999 in Germany. "And so it's possible to use them as conduits or little bypass segments."
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