Word: aorta
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Useless Pumping. In transposition, placement of the heart's outflow pipes is reversed. The aorta, the great artery designed to supply oxygenated blood to the entire body, arises from the right lower chamber (ventricle) of the heart instead of from the left. As a result, it carries used blood back into circulation. The pulmonary artery, designed to carry used blood to the lungs for oxygenation, arises from the left ventricle instead of from the right; as a result, oxygen-enriched blood is pumped uselessly back and forth between lungs and heart...
...Surgeon Michael Ellis DeBakey, 55, of Houston, a bold pioneer in attacking mechanical defects of blood vessels. DeBakey's work ranges from the aorta to the arteries that supply the brain; he has learned to repair them with ingenious grafts or get around the trouble with shunts...
Babies born with transposition of the great vessels-the aorta where the pulmonary artery ought to be, and vice versa -now face a problem for which there is no true cure. Why not cut out the baby's heart, ask the Stanford men. turn it around and sew it back so that the two sides of the heart exchange jobs...
There are, in fact, only three malformations: instead of arising only from the left ventricle, the aorta has outlets from each ventricle; the pulmonary artery or valve is narrowed; there is a hole in the wall between the ventricles. What Fallot thought was a fourth malformation, enlargement of the right ventricle, is a result of these three. It subsides when they are corrected. Youngest of three noted brothers, sons of Minneapolis Dentist C. I. Lillehei (still active in practice at 70): Heart Surgeon C. Walton Lillehei is 44; James, 38, specializes in lung physiology; Surgeon Richard...
...Gross led the way toward heart surgery with his pioneering patent-ductus operation (to shut off a vessel that is necessary during fetal life, but should close automatically soon after birth). He followed this with a more daring operation in 1946 to remove a narrowed section of the aorta-a crippling and potentially fatal defect with which some babies are born. Baltimore's Dr. Al fred Blalock opened the field for surgery directly on a malformed heart with the first blue-baby operation, which he devised in 1944 with Pediatrician Helen Taussig...