Dubai: A special unit to deal with heart defects of children will be set up soon at Dubai Hospital and the facilities will be available to patients from the Northern Emirates.
"Children with holes in the heart is common in the region," said Dr Obaid Al Jasem, head of cardiothoracic surgery at the Hospital.
Workshops are planned for this week where a team of top surgeons from Italy will be performing heart procedures on 14 children with congenital heart disease. The doctors here will be trained in the delicate procedures and the unit should be operational soon, said the doctor.
According to Dr Alexandro Frigiola, professor of cardiac surgery from San Donoto Hospital in Milan, four million children around the world are on the waiting list for such operations. "One million children are born every year with congenital heart disease," he said.
The doctor on Tuesday performed an operation called Tetrology of Fallot, named after a French physician. The operation involved correcting a combination of four defects in a two year-old child's heart. One of the abnormalities was pumping oxygen-poor blood from the right ventricle to mix with oxygen rich blood from left ventricle.
The doctors also had to contend with other major defects (see graphic).
Dr Frigiola said such abnormalities may be due to genetics or pollution, "there is no explanation", he said. The surgeon said this is a huge problem here, bigger than what it is in Europe and the US. "We are developing a paediatric unit here in Dubai that will be an international reference point where children from countries as India, Bangladesh and Somalia can be treated."
The team also performed interventions as angiography on two other children and closed a hole in the heart in another one. Dr Abdullah Raweh, cardiac surgeon with the team, said the UAE Red Crescent had sponsored 27 missions to countries in the Arab World, Africa and South America to perform similar operations on children.
The cases are treated free, he said.
