ATLANTA, Ga. (Ivanhoe Newswire) — It can literally take your breath away, leaving you feeling so exhausted, it’s hard to stand up or even walk. It’s a condition of the heart called hypertrophic cardiomyopathy. It’s when the walls of main pumping chamber of the heart become thick and stiff and won’t allow enough blood to pump through. It impacts two million people worldwide, and now, a game-changing procedure is hotwiring hearts back into shape.
Nothing stops 83-year-old Elberta Jenkins.
“I walk a lot. I go shopping. I go to thrift stores. I keep moving. You gotta keep moving.” Elberta says.
But a bad heart valve almost got the best of her.
She recalls, “I needed a new micro valve to put in and they told me they tried to put it in and they said I didn’t have an open, my arteries were closed up. They could not put it in and there was nothing else they could do for me.”
Surgery was too risky, and when they tried to replace the valve by using a catheter through the groin, thickened heart muscle wouldn’t allow them.
“That left us with needing to come up with a new solution,” says Adam Greenbaum, MD, an Interventional Cardiologist at Emory University.
That’s when a team at Emory University came up with the sesame procedure.
Dr. Greenbaum explains, “We do not need to open your chest and we do not need to put you on a heart lung machine, meaning stop the heart. This can be done with the heart beating the entire time.”
Dr. Greenbaum used a catheter with a wire at the end of it that uses radiofrequency energy to cut into the heart muscle.
“As we take a wire right where the muscle is too thick, we electrify the wire, and we make one longitudinal slice. And the muscle because it’s alive, will spread open, therefore creating the room that you need,” Dr. Greenbaum further explains.
Elberta got her new valve and hasn’t missed a step since!
“I feel great and I’m out walking every day and I feel real good,” she happily says.
Since the first sesame procedure three years ago, doctors at Emory say patients from all over the country have come to Emory to have it done. In the latest study, 82 patients had the procedure, and it was successful in 80 of them.
Contributors to this news report include: Marsha Lewis, Producer; Matt Goldschmidt, Videographer; Roque Correa, Editor.
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Sources:
https://www.tctmd.com/news/open-sesame-transcatheter-myotomy-shows-promise-lvot-obstruction
