RAD­HI­CA DE SIL­VA

rad­hi­ca.sookraj@guardian.co.tt

Promi­nent In­di­an car­dio­tho­racic sur­geon, Pro­fes­sor Dr Prashant Vai­jyanath, has per­formed South Trinidad’s first blood­less beat­ing heart by­pass surgery at the South­ern Med­ical Clin­ic in San Fer­nan­do.

Speak­ing to Guardian Me­dia dur­ing an ex­clu­sive in­ter­view, Pro­fes­sor Vai­jyanath said the two surg­eries were per­formed with­out any blood trans­fu­sions and any blood prod­ucts last week­end. He said the pa­tients were able to walk and talk with­in hours of the pro­ce­dures.

Ex­plain­ing the process, Pro­fes­sor Vai­jyanath said with the beat­ing-heart by­pass surgery, the pa­tient is op­er­at­ed on while the heart con­tin­ues to pro­vide blood to the rest of the body dur­ing the surgery.

Hav­ing done 15,000 open heart surg­eries dur­ing his life­time, Pro­fes­sor Vai­jyanath said the first surgery took two hours while the sec­ond was more com­pli­cat­ed and took two and a half hours.

Com­mend­ing the South­ern Med­ical Clin­ic for the state-of-the-art equip­ment avail­able, Pro­fes­sor Vai­jyanath said he was hap­py to part­ner with the fa­cil­i­ty to set up a car­diac pro­gramme for peo­ple suf­fer­ing from car­dio­vas­cu­lar dis­eases.

“We have sev­er­al para­pher­na­lia, brand new car­diac ICU ful­ly equipped with ded­i­cat­ed in­ten­sivists. We have a clin­i­cal care pro­gramme and as­sis­tant car­diac sur­geon,” he added.

Call­ing for a pub­lic-pri­vate part­ner­ship, he said the surgery can be done at a rea­son­able cost.

Pro­fes­sor Vai­jyanath al­so called for pri­vate/pub­lic part­ner­ships, say­ing this will make these surg­eries more af­ford­able.

“Most of the pub­lic ser­vices are not ac­ces­si­ble be­cause of the lack of in­fra­struc­ture and there is a huge wait­ing list in the pub­lic sys­tem. The Gov­ern­ment is will­ing to help with these surg­eries, which can cost $200,000 in pri­vate hos­pi­tals,” he added.

He ex­plained that South­ern Med­ical is charg­ing 30 per cent less to do the pro­ce­dure.

“We are plan­ning to do all by­pass op­er­a­tions with­in $150,000, which is rea­son­able,” he added.
Pro­fes­sor Vai­jyanath said cit­i­zens in T&T have a high risk and high in­ci­dence of di­a­betes, hy­per­ten­sion and life­time stress be­cause of con­sump­tion of fast food and processed food.

“The Amer­i­can lifestyle of fast food has ac­cel­er­at­ed the in­ci­dents of coro­nary heart dis­ease, so it is very vi­tal that lifestyle man­age­ment be stressed up­on, yo­ga, ex­er­cise, morn­ing walk­ing, weight con­trol pro­gramme, con­trol di­a­betes,” he added.

Mean­while, con­sul­tant car­dio­tho­racic sur­geon, Dr Samuel West, ex­pressed grat­i­tude to Pro­fes­sor Vai­jyanath for de­vel­op­ing the car­diac sur­gi­cal pro­gramme.

“We have a ded­i­cat­ed in­ten­sive care unit, high de­pen­den­cy unit, spe­cialised equip­ment, brand new heart/lung ma­chine and all items that go with coro­nary artery by­pass,” he said.

Dr West urged cit­i­zens to main­tain healthy lifestyles, say­ing coro­nary artery by­pass graft­ing was de­vel­oped to deal with the nar­row­ing of coro­nary ar­ter­ies.

“In this coun­try, we have a epi­dem­ic of di­a­betes, smok­ing, al­co­holism and, of course, an age­ing pop­u­la­tion,” he said, adding that this puts cit­i­zens at in­creased risk.