A team of doctors in the CARE Hospitals, Hyderabad has successfully made use of a rare non-surgical catheter technique to repair the rupture of the heart of a 56-year-old female patient admitted after a heart attack. This rare operation was performed for the first time in Andhra Pradesh and is known to have been successfully undertaken very few times in other parts of the world.

Announcing this at a press conference here, Dr Soma Raju, CMD CARE Hospitals said that the keyhole operation was performed successfully by placing a button like device across the hole in the heart (ventricular septal defect) under local anesthesia.

Ventricular septal defect is a complication of a severe heart attack for which routine open-heart surgery under cardiopulmonary bypass is the usual treatment procedure. Dr Soma Raju said that this operation was highly risky and carried a high mortality and morbidity.

The new procedure adopted by the CARE doctors made use of specialized imported disposables. The button device (Amplatzer) used for the operation was imported from USA and costs about US $ 1500.

Dr Sunil Kapoor, Dr M Srinivasa Rao, Dr Nitin Rao and Dr Nirmal Kumar of CARE Hospitals performed the operation that lasted for one hour.