For the first time in the world, Kyiv doctors saved a newborn baby with a fatal heart defect
Ukrainian doctors performed a unique operation on the heart of a newborn with a critical defect. For the first time in the world, surgeons of the Center of Cardiology and Cardiac Surgery of the Ministry of Health operated on a child immediately after cesarean section, creating conditions in the operating room that imitate the environment of the mother’s womb.
As reported director of the state institution “Scientific and Practical Medical Center of Cardiology and Cardiac Surgery of the Ministry of Health” Professor Ilya Yemets, the operation became unprecedented in the history of cardiac surgery.
“This is the first operation in the history of world cardiac surgery, when together with obstetrician-gynecologists led by Professor Dmytro Hovseyev, we performed an operation on a newborn immediately after a cesarean section, creating temperature comfort in the operating room, as in the mother’s womb, so to speak, an “artificial uterus” We combined two operating rooms at the same time: one was where the child was born, and in the second we immediately corrected the child’s heart defect, incompatible with life.” – said the professor.
The peculiarity of the operation was the age of the patient: it was literally minutes from the moment of cutting the umbilical cord to the connection to the heart-lung machine. The baby’s mother specially came to the Ukrainian Cardiocenter from Moldova, because even during pregnancy, doctors diagnosed the child with a severe congenital heart pathology – transposition of the main vessels. This disease is characterized by the incorrect location of the main vessels – the aorta and the pulmonary artery – in relation to the heart, which makes normal blood circulation impossible.
The operation took place on the thousandth day of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine and became a symbol of a scientific breakthrough even in the most difficult times.
