Dear Doctor, Please Don’t Cut Me Up
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Saibal Kar, MD, FACC, FSCAI
Director of Structural Heart Disease Interventions and Clinical Research at Los Robles Health System, Clinical Professor of Medicine at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA.
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The research which he heads has opened new cutting edge technology for Dr. Kar to study and propagate in a world heading for minimal invasiveness in treating patients.
Dr. Kar began his discourse by outlining the history of cardiac surgery, from the first visualization of the functioning of the heart through cardiac catheterization through the advances over the last six decades.
Conditions, which previously required open heart surgical procedures, can now be accomplished through non-surgical methods using catheterization and the placement of hardware in the heart and the vascular system through this mode. Various kinds of stents, that provide a scaffolding for blood vessels to maintain patency, have undergone improvement leading to the development of biodegradable ones now. Similarly, contraptions such as the Amplatzer Occluder and Edwards Sapien THV valves, have been developed to alleviate problems created by cardiac valve diseases as well as congenital heart disease.
Dr. Kar spoke in detail about new technology to treat Congenital Heart Disease and Valvular Heart Disease, principally the common Aortic Valve Stenosis and Mitral Valve Incompetence, (treated using the Alfieri Stitch placed through a catheter).
He also addressed the treatment of Advanced Heart Failure by correcting mitral regurgitation. Finally, he spoke about research in the prevention of strokes from atrial fibrillation using a Watchman Device.
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Summarized by:
Dr. Parvin D. Syal