New heart stents for infants mean kids could avoid series of surgeries
The FDA recently approved a heart stent made specifically for infants and young children, a device that could help kids born with certain congenital heart defects avoid a series of open heart surgeries over the course of their childhoods.
The Food and Drug Administration recently approved a heart stent made specifically for infants and young children, a device that could help kids born with certain congenital heart defects avoid a series of open heart operations over their childhoods.
About 40,000 babies are born with congenital heart defects in the U.S. each year, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In some cases, those defects are treated with stents, which prop open blood vessels, ensuring that blood can properly flow through them.
Typically, when infants and young children need stents, surgeons trim or modify adult-size stents and squeeze them into the tiny vessels of infants’ hearts, which are about the size of a walnut. (An adult’s heart is about the size of a fist.)
“What we’ve been doing for the past three decades is kind of jerry-rigging these adult stents and making them work for our patients,” said Dr. Evan Zahn, a pediatric cardiologist and director of the Guerin Congenital Heart program at Cedars Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles. “You can imagine that is less than ideal — they’re too big.”
This means that as the child grows older and their blood vessels get bigger, stents have to be replaced, often with open heart surgery, Zahn said.
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