Heal the heart of the one-year-old little girl Admitted to the university hospital complex of A Coruña (Chuac), she was the objective of the medical team that treated her almost from the first moment. And to achieve this, they tried a new technique that, roughly speaking, consists of keeping the least alive thanks to an artificial heart that, at the same time, allows the patient’s body to heal until it recovers one hundred percent. Specifically, Galician doctors managed to reverse a fulminant heart disease through the use of a state-of-the-art artificial heart.
This is the first case recorded nationwide in which a patient who suffered from fulminant myocarditis, managed to recover myocardial function through the use of a long-term artificial heart. thus avoiding the final alternative of a transplant. To contextualize the milestone, Chuac indicates that this type of infections with cardiac involvement and fulminant presentation They are quite uncommonwith an estimated incidence of one case per 100,000 patients. They also point out that “the success of this intervention would not be possible without the participation of a multidisciplinary team of professionals with cardiac surgeons, cardiologists, intensivists, anesthetists, nurses and physiotherapists, among others.”
The intervention took place last October and involved carrying out, for the first time in Spain, the total recovery of the heart of a one-year-old girl through the use of ECMO first (a mechanical circulatory and respiratory assistance device capable of provide heart and lung support) and an artificial heart as a final treatment to achieve absolute cure.
The minor was admitted to the emergency room with fulminant myocarditis due to parvovirus infection. Once diagnosed and admitted to the pediatric ICU, given the poor clinical evolutionthe medical team decides to implement ECMO. After some time, and after verifying that the heart function does not improve, it is decided to change the circulatory assistance device and resort to a long-term extracorporeal artificial heart (called Berlin Heart). “From this moment, the most likely future scenario, given the evolution of the case, is a heart transplant,” they point out from the hospital.
After two monthsand always in the hospital environment, a progressive improvement in myocardial function is seen, so the team of professionals at the pediatric ICU decides progressively reduce the help provided by the artificial heartuntil its final explant and total recovery of the patient’s myocardial function. “The excellent evolution of the patient in the following weeks after the removal of the artificial heart allowed her to be discharged from the hospital and to monitor her evolution with periodic visits to the outpatient clinics of the pediatric cardiology unit of the Teresa Herrera Maternal and Child Hospital.”
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