Heart surgery is becoming more and more common nowadays. With the rates of obesity on the rise, rates of bypass surgeries are also rising. These two conditions seem to go hand in hand. The unhealthy foods that you eat that cause you to become obese and are most likely the cause for your need for heart surgery. Even though heart surgery is becoming more common and thereby less risky, heart surgery is nothing to simply brush off. A very strict cardiac rehabilitation program after the surgery is often required.
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Open heart surgery is when the chest cavity is opened and surgery is performed on the heart itself. Only the chest is opened however, not the heart. In some special cases the heart may be opened during the surgery as well. Besides heart bypass surgery, another surgery that requires the opening of the chest cavity is a heart transplant. This is exactly what عملية القلب المفتوح it sounds like. The chest cavity is opened up and the heart removed to make room for a new, healthy heart. If you feel that you might be at risk for one of these procedures, now is the time to act. By simply eating heart healthy foods and starting an exercise regimen now, you can most likely avoid these invasive surgeries in the future. Your heart is your most important muscle; it is time to treat it as such.
If you need cardiothoracic surgery, this means that you require a procedure that addresses both the heart and the lungs. These surgeries generally treat any diseases that fall within the chest cavity. Heart disease and lung disease are the two main conditions that cardiothoracic surgery addresses. Cardiothoracic surgery can be divided into two different groups: thoracic surgery and cardio surgery. Most people are generally familiar with cardio surgery. Thoracic surgery addresses diseases in the chest cavity that don't deal with the heart. This would typically consist of treatment of the lungs, chest wall and diaphragm.
If having open heart surgery for any reason is potentially in your future, make sure that you act now. By taking care of yourself you will probably avoid any type of heart surgery altogether. Beginning a cardiac rehab program on your own is probably not a bad idea. This program will get you and your heart back to where they need to be: healthy.
Every year about 200,000 patients in the United States need a new heart valve because they have severe aortic stenosis. This is a condition in which the aortic valve starts to narrow and affect the efficient flow of blood from the heart to the other parts of the body. This can lead to congestive heart failure and sudden death.
Open-heart surgery is a very common procedure for such heart patients. However for some who are too old, too sick or may have had chest surgery before, this is not the option.
A less invasive procedure is now available for these patients. The doctor has to mount a valve on a catheter and then insert it into the patient's groin or chest and thread it towards the heart.
This technique does not require stopping the heart and placing the patient on a heart-lung bypass machine, so weaker or sicker patients can endure the procedure. Without valve replacement, the life expectancy of patients with severe aortic stenosis is typically less than five years.
This two-hour procedure to replace the damaged aortic valve with a 'stent-supported valve' was pioneered in France in 2002. In February 2009, Singapore became the first country in Asia to perform it.
Since then, five elderly patients have undergone this procedure at the Singapore General Hospital's National Heart Centre. This treatment is recommended only to patients who have no other options or who are suffering from narrowed-valve symptoms like chest pain and breathlessness.
This procedure is still relatively new and how long the valve will last and the long term effects are still unknown. Comparatively the synthetic valves used in conventional open-heart surgery lasts 10 to 20 years. For this reason, the hospital is not promoting the procedure to younger patients and those who are eligible for standard surgery.
There are also risk factors and a patient undergoing such procedure can die from a punctured blood vessel.
The success rates for this transcatheter technique in USA and Europe have been reported to be 90%.
The conventional valve costs about US$3000 while the new valve is almost 10 times more, though this is expected to be reduced in time.
With an aging population, the heart centres in Singapore are expected to treat an increasing number of patients with valve problems.