100 Doctors attend CME on World Heart Day at IMA Chandigarh

Chandigarh, September 30, 2019: As many 100 doctors from tricity attended a CME on World Heart Day at IMA here last night. The CME was organised by IMA in association of Ojas Super Speciality Hospital, Panchkula.
In CME, Dr Virendar Sarwal head- cardiovascular & thoracic at Ojas talked about new frontiers in cardiac Surgery’ whereas Dr Anurag Sharma, Director Cardiology spoke about ‘treatment of aortic stenosis, breaking the barrier : TAVR’
Dr Sarwal said that it is well proven that surgery is the only long-term solution for heart diseases and increases the survival. Thus it should be opted by most of the patients as first line of treatment without any fears.
He dwelled on the concept of minimal invasive surgery to give these patients more comfort during surgery by making it less stressful, less pain less stay in ICU and hospital and less requirement of blood products. This enable the patient to join work within 2-week instead of 6-week with conventional surgery as patients are discharged in 4 days after minimally invasive surgery, he remarked.
He further informed that these surgeries are done for bypass or valve replacements through small incisions on left or right side of chest which are hardly 4-5 inches in length. They are cosmetically very helpful specially in females as they are covered by the breast and clothing and no midline scar is visible in the patients. So it gives lot of confidence to patient and in females gives them lot of benefit socially especially those who need to get married after surgery, he asserted.
Dr Anurag said that new technique of TAVI for replacing the aortic valve with catheter-based device is again no way comparable to surgical replacement of the valve as TAVI is 5-8 times more costlier has limited application and even in his experience results with surgical replacements are better than this new technique.
Surgical replacement costs about 5 lakhs with same type of tissue valve whereas TAVI costs Rs. 16-25 lakhs which few Indian can afford and is not even approved by any insurance or govt packages, he pointed out.