Youngest Indian - bypass surgery - Fusion - WeRIndia

This 10-year-old boy became the youngest Indian to have gone through a bypass surgery. He is suffering from a rare genetic condition which gave him a deadly heart condition. His surgery was conducted by the surgeons at Fortis Escorts Heart Institute in New Delhi.

The boy was suffering from Homozygous Familial Hypercholesterolemia (HoFH). It is a very rare cholesterol disorder. The boy who was hailing from Mathura, Uttar Pradesh came to New Delhi for his treatment. He suffered with chest pain and breathlessness and was admitted to the hospital in New Delhi after he went to the doctors. At the Fortis institute, the doctors first wanted to do medical tests on him to find out the problem.

The tests revealed that the boy is suffering from a massive myocardial infarction (heart attack). He was in the condition of heart failure. After an angiography was conducted by the doctors, they found out that there was severe artery blockages which made the blood flow to heart muscle problematic. As a result, the boy needed immediate surgical intervention to help him. He needed an urgent Coronary Artery Bypass Grafting (CABG).

Dr Ramji Mehrotra, director, cardio-thoracic vascular surgery at Fortis institute said that conducting a bypass surgery to a boy of such age was a big challenge. This is because the surgery would need to join small caliber vessels to his arteries which are also very small. As the heart functioning of the boy was very poor, the doctors needed to choose the right grafts for him to last a very long period. However, the surgeon conducted the surgery well and the boy was discharged in a week.

The boy’s condition familial hypercholesterolemia, is a rare genetic disorder where the bad cholesterol level remains very high and the liver cannot remove it from the blood. This leads to blocking of arteries at a young age and thereby leading to heart attack.

Image Credit: Photo by National Cancer Institute on Unsplash (Free for commercial use)

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