TAVI procedure at Rajasthan Hospital gives Pakistani man new lease of life

New Delhi, Feb 17 (PTI) A 65-year-old man from Pakistan underwent the transcatheter aortic valve implantation (TAVI) procedure at RHL-Rajasthan Hospital in Jaipur, a seemingly impossible task since doctors elsewhere had ruled out a second open-heart surgery on him in less than a year.
     The patient was back home in Pakistan just five days after the procedure, said Dr Ravindra Singh Rao, MD, DM, FACC, who specialises in TAVR, MitraClip for non-surgical mitral valve repair.
     Upon reaching Rajasthan Hospital from Karachi, Shayed Nasir Ahmed was reevaluated by Rao and a team of doctors.
     “A 3D TEE test was done to assess the leakage in the mitral valve and the patient was diagnosed with a 3.5 mm perforation defect in the anterior leaflet (curtain) of the valve,” Dr Rao said.
     “This type of defect is very rare and difficult to treat as any device implanted in this defect can affect the valve mobility and function,” he said.
     The patient was taken to the cath lab and angiography was done to identify the valve leakage. It was successfully closed with a device. No open heart surgery was required.
     He was kept in the ICU for a night post-procedure and shifted to a room. Five days later, he was discharged from the hospital and flew back to Karachi, the hospital said.
     TAVI is a minimally invasive non-surgical procedure that allows doctors to replace a valve in the heart without opening up the patient's chest.
     Deliberating on the advantages of the TAVI procedure, Dr Sameer Gupta, Director of Interventional Cardiology at Metro Hospitals said, “TAVI is a breakthrough in interventional cardiology. This minimally-invasive procedure is for those who are at high risk from the conventional surgery.”
     “This procedure has opened up new possibilities for patients with aortic valve stenosis. It is less invasive and patients can return home within 48 hours or three to five days depending upon their healing rate,” Dr Gupta said.
     Karachi-based Shayed Nasir Ahmed had undergone open heart surgery and aortic valve replacement in May 2022 in Pakistan, the hospital said in its statement.
     But within a few days, he was diagnosed with leakage from the mitral valve.
     The solution was to replace the valves with another open heart surgery. But since he had undergone the same procedure recently, another surgery was deemed to be high risk for him.
     “We started browsing frantically through the Internet and that is when we came across Dr Ravindra Singh Rao who assured us that TAVI will be safe for me,” Ahmed said.
     “At the hospital, the staff and doctors were cordial and we never felt that we were in a different country," he said.
    

(This story has not been edited by THE WEEK and is auto-generated from PTI)