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Heart bypass technique used to save gangrenous leg

Indian surgeons have recorded a world first by borrowing a heart-bypass technique to save a woman's leg from amputation.

The operation carried out at a Jalandhar hospital, involved removing the radial artery from the left arm and using it as a bypass graft for leg which had turned pre-gangrenous from lack of blood circulation.

So far, surgeons have relieved blocked arteries in the leg by using bypasses made of veins removed from the leg itself in the same way they would a graft intended for cardiac bypass.

But 60-year-old Inder Kaur presented a peculiar problem -- her leg veins were already diseased and unserviceable.

With her leg turning blue for lack of oxygenated blood, surgeons were preparing to amputate it to prevent fatal blood poisoning when cardiac surgeon Dr Harinder Singh Bedi decided to try out a hunch.

If radial arteries could be used as grafts to save blood-starved hearts, Dr Bedi thought why not try it to save a limb.

Assisted by orthopaedic surgeon Dr P Lal and a team of doctors at the Tagore Heart Care and Research Centre at Jalandhar, Dr Bedi linked the femoral artery to the poplitial artery in the knee using a radial artery from the arm for the first time ever.

Kaur's leg recovered quickly. The technique became the talk of the 44th annual conference of cardiovascular and thoracic surgeons at Jaipur this March.

Following peer review, the technique has now been accepted as a world first by the United Society of Thoracic Surgery, and by the European Society of Cardiovascular Surgeons.

Blocked leg arteries cause great pain to victims and effectively cripples them. In advanced cases, where bypass surgery has failed amputation is often resorted to.

Bypasses made from leg veins or from artificial plastics often get blocked again, but the new technique is more promising, says Bedi.

The technique is also far cheaper than using a leg vein or plastic tube and even offers wider application for other limb salvage procedures, he said.

Kaur's operation was followed by a similarly successful one on a patient from Nawanshahr, Chain Singh. Singh's leg too was saved.

UNI

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