Word: batista
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There is an expression in Brazil--dar um jeito--that, loosely translated, means no problem is unsolvable and no barrier too great to cross. Dr. Randas Jose Vilela Batista adopted this attitude in dealing with the patients in his tiny rural hospital outside Curitiba, in the south of Brazil. Many of them were dying of congestive heart failure, which caused their hearts to weaken and enlarge. Because he lacked the resources necessary for the standard American treatments for the disease--drug therapy and heart transplant--Batista needed to come up with a different solution. The one he finally adopted appears...
...Batista's procedure could not have come at a more propitious time. Each year congestive heart failure is diagnosed in hundreds of thousands of people. Though doctors are not certain, they believe these patients' hearts were impaired either by damage resulting from a heart attack or by a viral infection. When thus weakened, the heart tries to compensate by stretching its muscles to help it beat. But as the heart's muscular left ventricle expands, it becomes less efficient at pumping blood through the body. Patients in late-stage heart failure pump as little as 15% of the blood that...
What makes Batista's procedure so revolutionary and so controversial is the seeming paradox of cutting away heart muscle to make the heart stronger. As Batista boldly excises chunks of the heart (some pieces are the size of a normal heart) and sews the heart back together, surgeons around the world are watching with both skepticism...
...stops, and then it is too late to donate the organ. (In the U.S., heart donations are possible because death is pronounced when brain activity ceases.) Dr. Torao Tokuda, chairman of the Tokushu-Kai Medical Corp., owner of 40 hospitals and 70 clinics in Japan, plans to spread the Batista procedure to all his facilities. Says one of his top surgeons, Dr. Hisayoshi Suma: "This surgery is of great importance worldwide...
While his operation goes against the general thinking in cardiac surgery, Batista believes he is just respecting nature's laws. He developed his ideas by studying the hearts of animals he found on his horse farm near the Angelina Caron Hospital, where he works. To his astonishment, the heart of every animal he examined, from snake to buffalo, had the exact same proportion of muscle mass to heart size. He found that the relationship came down to a simple equation, loosely based on the law of La Place: mass = 4 x radius3. For every centimeter that it enlarges, the heart...