Portable devices can save lives in sudden cardiac
arrests
New
Delhi: Nimit Ahuja, a 35-year old software professional, was shopping at a mall
when he suddenly collapsed. He was rushed to a hospital where he was pronounced
dead. He had suffered from what doctors call a sudden cardiac arrest.
Cardiologists
say young lives like these can be saved if there are facilities like Automated
External Defibrillators (AED) available at public places in India. An AED is a
portable device that can automatically diagnose a sudden cardiac arrest and
help save life with the press of a button. It sends an electric shock to the
heart to restore its normal rhythm and bring a person back from the verge of
death.
"An
AED, if used during a cardiac arrest within the first 4-6 minutes, can save
more than 95 percent of lives," Bipin Kumar Dubey, director, department of
cardiology in the Rockland group of hospitals, told IANS.
"There
should be at least one AED available at all public spaces like shopping malls
and airports. The government should make it mandatory for builders to set up at
least one AED in all public buildings," he said.
Doctors
said Sudden Cardiac Arrest (SCA) is a leading cause of death and account for
greater than 50 percent of cardiovascular deaths in India. More than 660,000
deaths occur every year in India alone as a result of SCA. The SCA is a
condition in which the heart suddenly and unexpectedly stops beating. If this
happens, blood stops flowing to the brain and other vital organs.
Experts
said people who have heart disease are at a higher risk for SCA. SCA can
however happen in people who appear healthy and have no known heart disease or
other risk factors like hypertension.
Ram
E. Rajagopalan in the department of critical care medicine in Sundaram Medical
Foundation of Chennai said if an AED is used on a patient suffering with a
sudden cardiac arrest his chances of survival will grow by more than 60
percent.
"We
definitely need the common man to be aware of what an AED is, as anyone
anywhere with access to an AED can save a life," Rajagopalan told IANS.
Lamenting
that very few people know how to respond to emergency situations like SCAs in
India, Anil Bansal, chief cardiologist at Columbia Asia Hospital in Gurgaon,
said people have to be trained to use an AED. "The need of the hour is to
make AED devices available at all public spaces and to train people on how to
use them," he added.
A
recent study in medical journal Lancet said that by 2010, 60 percent of the
world's heart patients would be in India. As per World Health Organization
(WHO) statistics, mortality due to cardiac causes has overtaken mortality due
to all cancers put together across the world.
28.09.2013
Alternative to open-heart surgery performed
London:
Doctors in the US have successfully performed an alternative procedure to
open-heart surgery.
The
doctors at the UCLA Medical Centre, California, performed the pioneering
procedure on a man to remove a 24-inch blood clot -- stretching from his legs
to the heart, the Daily Mail reported Wednesday.
Todd
Dunlap, 62, became the first person to successfully undergo the procedure after
it was offered to him instead of the more critical open-heart surgery, the
report said.
Doctors
said the procedure could be used more widely in future as an alternative to the
open-heart surgery as it was a great option for the older, frail person who
wouldn't survive open-heart surgery, added the report.
A
tiny camera was slid down into Dunlap's oesophagus to monitor his heart before
putting a coiled tube though his neck artery to plug one end into his heart,
against the clot.
Doctors
threaded the other end through a vein at the groin and hooked the tube up to a
powerful heart-bypass device in the operating room to create suction.
"Once
in place, the AngioVac (the device used to vacuum out the clot) quickly sucked
the deadly clot out of Dunlap's heart and filtered out the solid tissue,"
said Moriarty, who offered the procedure to Dunlap.
"The
system then restored the cleansed blood through a blood vessel near the groin,
eliminating the need for a blood transfusion," the Daily Mail quoted
Moriarty as saying.
The
procedure lasted three hours.
Murray
Kwon, cardiothoracic surgeon at the UCLA, said: "Retrieving a clot from
within the heart used to require open-heart surgery, resulting in longer
hospitalisation, recovery and rehabilitation times compared to the minimally
invasive approach provided by the AngioVac system."
28.09.2013
Remember if people talk behind your
back, it only means you are two steps ahead
Fannie Flagg,
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