Doctors Save Newborn With Birth Defect Of Heart At SUM Hospital In Bhubaneswar

Bhubaneswar, Oct. 23: The doctors at the Institute of Medical Sciences and SUM Hospital, here have saved the life of a four-day-old baby girl who had a birth defect of the heart.

The baby, weighing 2.3 kg, was admitted in the hospital with oxygen saturation of less than 50% and rushed to the Neo-natal ICU as the saturation level was coming down fast. She was diagnosed with D-TGA, a birth defect of the heart in which the two main arteries carrying blood out of the heart are found in switched position.

Dr Behera and his team conducted an emergent procedure called Balloon Atrial Septostomy (BAS) and performed Patent Ductus Arteriosus (PDA) stenting. While BAS led to the creation of a hole in the heart, PDA stenting helped maintain the link between the two major blood pipes. These two combined procedures resulted in instant improvement in the baby’s oxygen saturation from 40% to 95%.

The baby was extubated and stabilised in the NICU for seven days. Dr Jagdish Sahoo, Dr Abhilipsa Acharya and the team of doctors at NICU managed the baby nicely before she was referred to Sree Chitra Tirunal Institute for Medical Sciences and Technology at Thiruvananthapuram in Kerala where corrective surgery was done on her. “This was perhaps the first neonatal cardiac intervention of its kind undertaken in our state,” Dr Behera said.

Explaining D-TGA disease, he said it as a life threatening congenital cyanotic heart problem which usually surfaces in the first few days of life. “The child suddenly turns blue, becomes lethargic and shows breathing distress and oxygen saturation falls to less than 90%,” he said adding immediate diagnosis was the most important thing which could be done by a cardiologist.

Pointing out that awareness about such congenital heart problem in newborn babies and children in Odisha was very low, he said many such babies die undiagnosed and for lack of necessary intervention.