*KARACHI: A team of doctors successfully performed Pakistan’s first-evermechanical heart transplant at the National Institute of Cardio VascularDiseases (NICVD) on Monday.*
It is being seen as a milestone in Pakistan’s medical history, while theuse of this technology is unprecedented in Pakistan’s history. 62-year-oldNafeesa Begum is the first patient to undergo this surgery and receive amechanical heart transplant.
Administrator of NICVD Dr Hameedullah Malik said the woman’s heart was only15 percent functional prior to the surgery but all her other organs wereworking fine.
The whole procedure was performed by Dr Pervez Chaudhry, who joined theNICVD team on the request of Head of NICVD Dr Nadeem Qamar, along with histeam that consists of eight experts.
Introducing mechanical heart transplant technology was an initiative takenby Qamar. “We had been working on structuring this department for about sixmonths now,” Dr Malik added.
He informed that a regular heart transplant is inserting a new heart in thebody but in a mechanical heart transplant the organ is not replaced, infact the pumping mechanism is fixed by using a device. This device thenpumps blood across the body, he explained.