Chandigarh: In a first for a hospital in north India, the cardiac team of the PGIMER here performed the complex minimally invasive heart valve procedure on a 78-year-old man, it said on Saturday. A leading hospital in northern India, the Post Graduate Institute of Medical Education and Research (PGIMER) is a public medical university and an ‘Institute of National Importance’.
“With this landmark transfemoral transseptal mitral valve replacement (TMVR) procedure, PGIMER enters into a league of pioneer institutes in structural heart interventions at national and international level,” PGIMER said in a statement.
The team was led by interventional cardiologist and structural heart specialist Prof Dr Parminder Singh Otaal.
TMVR is a minimally invasive but technically challenging procedure to replace a mitral valve without the need for conventional open-heart surgery, indicated to treat selected cases of narrowed mitral valve (mitral valve stenosis), leaky mitral valve (mitral valve regurgitation), or a mix of the two.
Otaal, who recently returned from the UK after completing a fellowship in transcatheter heart valve operations from the Liverpool Heart and Chest Hospital, said the patient was a 78-year-old man who had undergone bypass surgery along with mitral valve replacement in 2005.
He also suffered from hypertension, kidney problems and low platelet count.
“Recently, he started having breathlessness … and was admitted with heart failure. He was diagnosed with structural degeneration of the previously implanted bioprosthetic surgical valve, leading to leakage as well as blockage, for which reintervention was mandatory,” Otaal said.
Being at very high risk for conventional redo valve surgery, TMVR offered a minimally invasive alternative for valve replacement at a very low risk, said the doctor.
No open surgical access through the chest was required for the procedure and the patient completely recovered within a few hours. This innovative technology shows promise for patients with advanced mitral valve disease, he said.
