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Indian tele-cardiology helps young Malaysian heart patients
Turkmenistan News.Net
Sunday 6th July, 2008 (IANS)
Tele-cardiology, an online consultancy offered by a renowned Indian hospital, has helped shorten the long queues of heart patients, particularly children, in Malaysia.
The tele-cardiology consultancy has been pioneered by Devi Prasad Shetty, chairman and chief cardiologist of Narayana Hrudayalaya (NH) Institute of Cardiac Sciences in Bangalore. It helps in diagnosis after the preliminary tests are conducted, preparing the patients for surgery, if needed.
As one of the world's largest paediatric heart hospitals, Narayana Hrudayalaya conducts 40 per cent of its surgeries on children, some as young as a day old.
Since 2006, MediAssist4U, a Malaysian NGO, has helped about 60 Malaysian children undergo corrective heart surgery with the help of the NH, the New Straits Times said Sunday.
During a tele-conference with the Malaysian media recently, Shetty said the tele-cardiology service between the Narayana Hrudayalaya and cardiac care centres in Malaysia, Mauritius and Bangladesh, had made cardiac care more affordable.
It also helps follow-up treatment of the patient in the home country.
The Bangalore hospital also offers cheaper surgery than Malaysia, where heart treatment is expensive and many people have to seek donations for treatment in private hospitals or go abroad.
Due to insufficient facilities and paediatric cardiac surgeons at Institut Jantung Negara and government hospitals, the waiting list for surgery is long. Time is often not on the side of young patients, the newspaper said.
'No child should have to beg for funds to live,' said Lawrence, medical director of MediAssist4U.
'Our aim is to make healthcare affordable to everyone because the language of pain and suffering does not discriminate. Our services are available to everyone, regardless of their financial status.'
Heart surgery for children costs around RM10,000 ($3,120 approx.) at NH, while for adults, charges are between RM8,000 ($2,500 approx.) and RM10,000 ($3,050 approx.).
Lawrence said the initial diagnosis was done at the MediAssist4U clinic, which is connected online to the Narayana Hospital.
'For example, we do the ECG and other tests at our clinic here and the information is transmitted to the cardiologists at Narayana Hrudayalaya, who diagnose the patient's condition and recommend treatment.'
'We have done over 2,700 ECGs for free over the past five years. And it doesn't cost us anything because everything is online and we have specialists from private and government hospitals who volunteer their services.'
Once a diagnosis has been made, the patient can choose to have the treatment or corrective surgery done locally or at NH.
'Because of the long waiting period and high cost of surgery here, many opt to do it at Narayana Hrudayalaya.'
In most cases, the cost of surgery, plus travel and accommodation for the accompanying relative, does not exceed RM15,000 ($4950).
The low cost and world-class treatment at the hospital have come as a blessing to hundreds of Malaysians, especially children, who suffer from a range of heart ailments, including complicated cases such as ectopic heart in which the heart is not properly located in the body.
This facility also enabled easier follow-up treatment of the patient from the home country.
The 285-bed Narayana Hrudayalaya conducts 30 open heart surgeries every day, half of which are done free.
It is the first hospital in Asia to carry out an artificial heart transplant on a 54-year-old Indian man in March, the newspaper said.
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Comments on this story
Sultan of Marketing
07-09-08, 12:36 PM |
Indian tele-cardiology helps young Malaysian heart patients
This is a question of trying to get over the waiting list of patients going for heart surgery..especially children....sending patients to Bangalore only confirms the poor healthcare policies practiced by the Malaysian government....saying you cant take care of your own...makes one wonder what the heck they were doing for 50 years.....ah yes...it is the NEP isnt it.....must have bumi heart surgeons...even if it means Malaysian children having to die in the waiting list .....or end up in Bangalore.....what a laughing stock Malaysia has become.......what a paradox.....Chinaman Health Minister cannot control warring Malay heart specialists who are doling out shit heart services ending up with Malaysian kids ending up in 4thb world nation......
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waltky
07-19-08, 02:42 AM |
Figure 15-20 years before it is in the operating room...
:cool:
Heart Blood Vessels Grown in the Lab
FRIDAY, July 18 `08 — Researchers say they have grown in mice the kind of functioning heart blood vessels that cardiac surgeons create with bypass operations.
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One ultimate goal is to replace some heart surgery with injections of laboratory-grown cells that would establish themselves in the body, providing a system of blood vessels for damaged hearts that need more oxygen, said Juan M. Melero-Martin, a co-author of a paper in the July 18 issue of the journalCirculation Research: Journal of the American Heart Association.
“We are proving the concept in mice who are compromised so that they don’t reject human cells," said Melero-Martin, a research fellow at Harvard Medical School and Children’s Hospital Boston. “For clinical use, the way we envision it, if a patient has need to vascularize ischemic tissue, we can get cells from the patient ahead of time, grow them and inject them back into the patient."
Ischemic tissue is starved of blood because of blocked arteries or other damage, and revascularization restores the vessels through which blood can flow to that tissue. The research team is not using stem cells, which are controversial, because they are obtained from human embryos. Instead, they are using what are called progenitor cells, easily obtained from blood or bone marrow, which can grow to become various sorts of adult cells. The progenitor cells used in the study grew into full-fledged blood vessel systems in the laboratory mice.
The researchers combined two kinds of progenitor cells, one for those that line the surface of blood vessels, the other for cells that surround the lining and provide stability. They found that a mix of the two kinds of progenitor cells derived from adult blood and bone marrow or umbilical cord and adult bone marrow gave the best growth of blood vessels.
“Our next goal down the line is to use them in humans," said Joyce Bischoff, associate professor of medicine at Harvard and senior author of the report. Much work lies ahead, she said. “We need to do a lot more animal studies to test how these cells behave in different tissues," Bischoff said. “We have proved that the cells have the ability," Melero-Martin said. “Now we have to see how to implement this in a clinical situation."
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