New lease of life for kidney patients needing heart surgery

Hyderabad, Feb 8: A scientific study by a team of doctors at the multi-speciality CARE Hospital here, offering a new lease of life to kidney patients needing bypass heart surgery, has won recognition from the Philadelphia-based American Association of Thoracic Surgery.

The study, one of the largest such in the world from a single centre, conducted by Dr Lokeswara Rao Sajja, Dr Gopichand Mannam and Dr Rajasekhara Chakravarthi, proved unequivocally that ''patients with kidney disease do better with beating-heart bypass surgery than on-pump coronary bypass surgery''.

''We also found that following successful bypass operation, kidney function also improved,'' Hospital Chairman B Somaraju told reporters here.

For the first time in 30 years, a scientific paper was accepted from India by the international association and published in the Journal of Thoracic and Cardiovascular Surgery, he added.

Under the conventional method, patients with kidney failure requiring bypass heart surgery, had to undergo prolonged hospitalisation for dialysis and it might even lead to loss of life, they said.

They said the study found that ''on-pump in comparison with off-pump coronary artery bypass grafting is more deleterious to renal function in diabetic patients with non-dialysis dependent renal insufficiency. Modification of Diet in Renal Disease equation (MDRD GFR) is a more sensitive investigation than serum creatinine levels to assess renal insufficiency in patients undergoing coronary bypass.''

UNI