13-Year-Old Girl’s Life Saved By Dual Chamber Pacemaker Implant At Bhopal's BMHRC

Bhopal (Madhya Pradesh): A 13-year-old gas-affected girl's life was saved by implanting a dual chamber pacemaker in an emergency in Bhopal.

Now the girl's condition is better, and she has been discharged from the hospital on Thursday.

Assistant Professor of the Cardiology Department of BMHRC, Dr. Aman Chaturvedi, said that this patient was suffering from heart disease since birth. At the age of three, she had an operation for a hole in her heart (congenital heart defect). After the operation, she had a heart block — that is, the heartbeat became abnormally slow. Due to this, she started having problems like dizziness and darkness in front of the eyes.

In the case of heart block, an epicardial pacing device was installed in her childhood itself. In this procedure, pacemaker wires are placed on the outer surface of the heart, which is usually adopted in small children because their heart size is small. The life of this device is about 10 years. After the completion of the device's duration, the patient recently started having the same symptoms again.

Usually, pacemakers are installed in middle-aged or elderly people, but very few cases of installing pacemakers in children are reported. It is also difficult to do this in children or adolescents because children have a small heart, in which it is difficult to fit the device.

Also, the child's body develops with time; in such a situation, the device working for a long period becomes a technical challenge. Not only this, the length of the pacemaker wires, their fitting, and their position inside the body have to be decided very carefully for the future. The cardiology team of BMHRC kept the patient safe by taking all precautions.

Dr. Manisha Shrivastava, Director-in-Charge of BMHRC, said, "The efficiency and expertise with which our cardiology department team treated this critical condition is truly commendable. It was a technical challenge to implant a dual chamber pacemaker in this 13-year-old girl.”