National Heart Centre of the Royal Hospital (RH) succeeded for the first time in the Sultanate to implant the EDWARDS artificial heart valve by performing a catheter procedure.
The patient had already undergone a surgery for implanting an artificial valve five years ago.
However, he suffered from valvular cardiomyopathy due to a bacterial infection. He started to experience serious complications such as shortness of breath, immediate fatigue at any effort and weakness in the biological heart functions.
The therapeutic cardiac catheterisation was conducted by a medical team from the RH National Heart Centre, led by Dr. Salim Al Maskri, director of the National Heart Centre and a paediatric cardiac senior consultant, with the collaboration of anaesthetists, cardiac technicians, and the nursing staff. The procedure took around two hours.
Dr. Abdullah Al Farqani, a paediatric cardiac senior consultant, explained the several benefits that this therapeutic Catheter affords to a patient, including avoiding an open-heart surgery, minimised side effects compared to surgical operations, and short-stay admission.
Above all, the patient can enjoy his normal daily activities after only two days of performing the catheterisation.
It should be noted that the Royal Hospital began to use the MELODY artificial heart valve implantation technique in 2012 and recently introduced the EDWARDS technique to cover the cardiac cases.
Source: timesOfoman