Dell Children’s Medical Center in Austin, part of Ascension Texas, recently performed the first pediatric heart surgery procedure of its kind at the hospital. In the procedure, a 12-year-old patient received a life-saving mechanical heart pump after surviving two hours of cardiopulmonary resuscitation.
Grace Jennings was the first to have a left ventricular assist device (LVAD) planted at Dell Children’s. It’s part of the growing list of surgeries being performed at Dell Children’s since Charles Fraser Jr., MD, joined the hospital in 2018 to create the Texas Center for Pediatric and Congenital Heart Disease, a partnership of Dell Children’s, Dell Medical School at the University of Texas at Austin, and UT Health Austin.
Her heart valve was leaking a lot when she went to Dell Children’s last September. Doctors hoped to fix it surgically, but “we had to do so much more,” Dr. Fraser told the Austin American–Statesman.
She went into cardiac arrest and needs two hours of CPR. The doctors hooked her up to an extracorporeal membrane oxygenation machine (ECMO), which pumps the blood for the heart. But ECMO is not a long-term solution.
Dr. Fraser decided to use the Berlin Heart ventricular assist device, which stays outside the body and runs on a battery pack and controller that she can carry in her backpack. The ventricular assist device does 80-90% of the work pumping blood, with the heart doing the rest.
Dr. Fraser estimates that only 20-30 children in the United States have had the kind of defect Grace had and then had an LVAD inserted.
Although she could stay with the LVAD the rest of her life, it has limitations, so plans are to put Grace on the heart transplant list once Dell Children’s is approved to do transplants.
Click here for the American-Statesman story or here for the story at Fox 7 Austin.
