ATLANTA, Ga. (Ivanhoe Newswire) – You may feel so exhausted that it literally takes your breath away, making it difficult to stand up or even walk. It is a heart disease called hypertrophic cardiomyopathy. A condition in which the walls of the heart’s main pumping chamber become thick and hard, making it difficult to pump enough blood. It has affected 2 million people around the world and is now using groundbreaking procedures to get the mind back on track.
There’s nothing stopping 83-year-old Elberta Jenkins.
“I walk a lot. I go shopping. I go to the thrift store. I keep moving. I have to keep moving,” Elberta said.
However, her heart valves started to malfunction and she almost collapsed.
“I needed to have a new microvalve put in, and when they tried to put it in, they said there was no hole and the artery was blocked. They couldn’t put it in. There was nothing else I could do,” she recalled.
Surgery was too risky and an attempt was made to replace the valve using a catheter through the groin, but the thickened heart muscle prevented that.
“So we had to come up with a new solution,” said Dr. Adam Greenbaum, an interventional cardiac specialist at Emory University.
That’s when the Emory University team came up with the sesame procedure.
“You don’t have to open your chest, you don’t have to put on a heart-lung machine, which means you don’t have to stop your heart. You can do this while your heart continues to beat,” Dr. Greenbaum explained.
Dr. Greenbaum used a wire-tipped catheter and used radiofrequency energy to cut into the heart muscle.
“We take a wire where the muscle is too thick, we run an electric current through the wire, and we create one longitudinal slice. And since the muscle is alive, it stretches out and expands to create the space it needs.” Dr. Greenbaum explained.
Elberta hasn’t left the house since getting the new valve.
“I feel great and I walk outside every day. I feel really good,” she said.
Since the Goma surgery was first performed three years ago, Emory doctors say patients have come from all over the country to undergo the procedure. In the latest study, 82 patients underwent this procedure, and 80 of them were successful.
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