A team of doctors at a Sapporo hospital has for the first time performed a new type of surgery to help restore the heart functions of patients suffering from dilated cardiomyopathy, which often causes heart failure, said the doctor who led the surgery.
The doctors at the Sapporo hospital run by NTT East Corp. recently operated on a 62-year-old Sapporo man who was suffering from the disorder, which caused his left ventricle to swell and his heart muscles to shrink and weaken, said Yoshiro Matsui, the head of the hospital's cardiac surgery department.
The procedure involved transferring heart muscle from the swollen side of the patient's left ventricle to the other side, reducing the ventricle's size and boosting the patient's heart function.
Until now, doctors have relied on heart transplants or removing some of a patient's heart muscles -- known as "Batista surgery" after Brazilian surgeon Randas Jose Vilela Batista -- to cure dilated cardiomyopathy.
The Medical Center NTT East will report the outcome of the latest surgery at a meeting of the Japanese Association for Thoracic Surgery to be held in Osaka on Oct. 5, Matsui said.
The patient recovered from the illness and left the hospital about two weeks after the surgery, Matsui said, noting the man told the hospital he was pleased to be able to climb up and down stairs.