Dubai: A Dubai-based cardiologist has pioneered a new procedure to treat artery blockages that is being studied by heart doctors from Europe.
Dr Talib Majwal, Director of Interventional Cardiology at Dubai Hospital, pioneered this technique in January this year and has treated 80 patients so far using this method.
The technique has been dubbed by him as the ‘Dubai Technique’. Last week a team of doctors from Austria visited Dubai Hospital to receive training on how to use this technique.
“We received excellent feedback from doctors the world over to this new method to treat complex heart blockages,” he said. The training programmes for European doctors will continue until May next year, he said. He said the technique will be published in a prestigious Amercian cardiology publication.
“When we began using the ABSORB technique last year, we realised we could modify it to treat complex blockages of the main artery or a branch of the artery. We modified the technique and it worked beautifully to solve complex cases that were otherwise difficult to treat,” he said.
The ABSORB technique uses an insertion of a stent that dissolves in the body after a while. A stent is a small mesh tube that is used to treat narrow or weak arteries. It is placed in an artery as part of a procedure called angioplasty that restores blood flow through narrow or blocked arteries.
“This [Dubai Technique] is better than using a stent inserted into a diseased artery, because the stent is a permanent fixture that remains in the blood vessel, The ABSORB scaffold progressively dissolves over a period of two years, leaving the artery widened but with no trace of the device.”
He said the Dubai technique is a modified version of the ABSORB technique and is mainly used for complex arterial blockages.
“Our aim now is to train doctors from various parts of the world to use this technique so that cardiac patients with complex arterial blockages can benefit from this new technique.”
UAE residents suffer from heart problems a decade younger than the world average, surgeons earlier said. The reasons are poor lifestyle, smoking, eating junk food and lack of exercise.
Heart disease is the number one killer in the country.