Lagos-based Tristate Hospital in Lekki has successfully carried out a complicated open-heart surgery on a 13-day-old baby. The unnamed baby was born with a rare congenital abnormality of the heart known in medical terms as “transposition of the great arteries”.
In layman’s terms, the two main arteries leaving the baby’s heart were transposed i.e., wrongly connected to the lower chambers of the heart ventricles.
The life-saving procedure, known as an “arterial switch operation” – a complex type of pediatric cardiothoracic surgery, lasted about 19 hours and was carried out by a Nigerian team of specialists. Only the most skilled pediatric surgeons around the globe are known to carry out the procedure successfully.
The medical team was headed by Professor Kamar Adeleke, a professor of medicine/cardiology, interventional cardiologist, and the Founder/CEO, of Tristate Healthcare system – a conglomeration of best-in-class super-specialty healthcare providers.
Reporting on the medical feat, Adeleke, who is the President/CEO of the Tristate Cardiovascular Institute, and Chief, Division of Cardiac Catheterization and Interventional Laboratory, University College Hospital, Ibadan, Oyo State, commented that the arterial switch operation is an open-heart procedure that is usually done within two weeks of life or it will be too late.
He further went on to explain that as a result of the abnormality, blood containing oxygen from the baby’s lungs was being pumped back into the lungs, while blood that lacks oxygen was pumped throughout the body.
Highlighting the fact that congenital heart defects occur in about 0.01 percent of the Nigerian population, Adeleke argued that the feat was a significant one in the sense that the condition was being tackled locally for the first time.
On a scale of 10, the complexity of the surgery is about 9, so the procedure was a huge feat.
