Word: aorta
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Last week Dr. Bernhard told the Society of University Surgeons meeting in Seattle that four blue children have had operations in the chamber. Two died of complications. But two who were suffering from one of the most surgically forbidding of all congenital defects, transposition of the great vessels (aorta and pulmonary artery), are doing well after palliative operations...
...such murmurs often disappear without treatment. But as Ro Anne grew, she had less and less energy. Diagnostic studies in 1959 at Denver's National Jewish Hospital showed that her heart's left ventricle had become enlarged by having to pump against the resistance of a narrowed aorta. She was too ill for an operation then. Even more disturbing, the doctors diagnosed Ro Anne's aortic abnormality as a form in which the great artery is narrowed just above the point where it leaves the heart, close to the aortic valve. This is such a rare condition...
When Ro Anne's temperature dropped to 82°, her heart stopped beating. The pump was already doing her heart's work and also cooling her blood. It continued to do so while the surgeons put clamps on the aorta both above and below the constriction. Dr. Newman made an inch-long cut in the aorta's wall and stitched in a plastic (Teflon) gusset, two-thirds of an inch wide at the base. This made the great artery a uniform width from the aortic valve to its big bend. Ro Anne's temperature...
...Last summer Patricia went to Dr. Arthur E. Prevedel, 44, who put her into Children's Hospital in Denver. He worked plastic tubes through arm veins into both sides of her heart, injected a radiopaque dye and took X rays to get a clear picture of her narrowed aorta. Her operation differed only in technical details from Ro Anne's. Dr. Prevedel sewed in a similar Teflon patch, and Patricia went home nine days later...
...Technically known as supravalvular aortic stenosis; not to be confused with coarctation of the aorta (a far commoner condition), which is a narrowing of the aorta just beyond its "big bend" in the upper chest, several inches from the heart...