Re-interventions are common in long-term survivors of childhood heart operation
"Unfortunately, for many patients, the Fontan is not the final intervention," said study leader Andrew Glatz, MD MSCE, referring to the Fontan operation, the third in a series of reconstructive operations performed on children with a severely underdeveloped ventricle, one of the heart's two pumping chambers. Glatz is a pediatric interventional cardiologist in the Cardiac Center at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia ( CHOP ). Glatz and colleagues published their study on September 1, 2017 in Circulation: Cardiovascular Interventions . Other key members of the study team include Tacy Downing, MD and Kiona Allen, MD (both were pediatric cardiology fellows at CHOP during the work); and David Goldberg, MD and William Gaynor, MD (current faculty members in the Cardiac Center at CHOP). The study team performed a retrospective review of 773 patients who underwent the Fontan operation at CHOP between 1992 and 2009. Although the Fontan procedure offers high survival r...