Doctors' techniques help heart patients recover faster
April 26, 1996
Web posted at: 12:45 a.m. EDTFrom Correspondent Andrew Holtz
ATLANTA, Georgia (CNN) -- Each year, doctors perform some 500,000 heart bypass surgeries in the United States. It can take up to two months for their patients to recover enough to return to work. Now some surgeons at Stanford Medical Center and New York's Lenox Hill Hospital are trying alternatives that are less traumatic to patients.
At Stanford Medical Center, surgeons have been testing a different method using what they call "keyhole incisions."
Instead of cutting open the chest to expose the heart, doctors make small slits, or ports, in the chest. Then, using special tools, they move and stitch the blood vessels that feed the heart muscle.
"We are very excited," said Dr. Frederick St. Goar of Stanford University Medical Center. "We've seen a patient, 10 days after his procedure, out jogging. We've seen another patient, three weeks after his procedure, back on the golf course."
The Stanford doctors stop the heart during the operation and use a heart-lung machine as in conventional bypass surgery.
At New York City's Lenox Hill Hospital, surgeons operate on a beating heart through small incisions, and they don't use a heart-lung machine during the surgery. "The recovery rate is very quick. Most of these people can get back to their usual lifestyle within a week," said Lenox Hill's Dr. Valavanur Subramanian.
Hugo Stalder is one of them. On the day he left the hospital, he and a friend couldn't hail a cab. So they walked home. "It was maybe about 15 minutes' walk, you know, slow, but I walked home, and that was four days after the operation," he said.
Like most patients who underwent the experimental bypass surgery, Stalder had tried balloon angioplasty and similar procedures, but each time the blockage in one of his heart arteries returned.
Surgeons say they need more experience with working through keyhole incisions before they can directly challenge conventional bypass surgery.
The Lenox Hill surgeons have so far operated on some 100-odd people and have lost three patients. Stanford surgeons have tried their technique on 10 patients. All are doing well.
The Stanford group is about to try a similar approach to replacing heart valves. The doctors stress it's all still very much an experiment. "There's clearly a learning curve, a steep learning curve," said St. Goar. Yet, they are looking forward to the day when people can get the benefits of heart bypass surgery, without all the trauma.
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