Four-month-old survives rare heart condition
04 Mar 2016
A four-month-old miracle baby from Solapur survived more than 20 heart attacks over two months before she underwent life-saving cardiac surgery in a Mumbai hospital.
Aditi Gilbile is recovering and would lead a normal life after eight to nine months, according to her doctors.
Aditi was diagnosed with a rare congenital malfunction, Anomalous Left Coronary Artery from Pulmonary Artery (ALCAPA), which is seen in one in 3 lakh children. Symptoms of the ailment started appearing in January, when she was two months old. According to her mother, Preeti, Aditi started being irritable, and her breathing and feeding patterns changed.
"She would sweat profusely and refused to be breastfed. We rushed her to a doctor the day she bawled incessantly for three hours," The Times of India reported the mother as saying, adding that her weight gain was also affected, .
The parents approached a doctor in Barshi taluka, where the family resides, who identified the involvement of the heart.
He referred the family to Pune, where the infant was diagnosed with ALCAPA. Her parents then approached the HN Reliance Hospital at Charni Road in Mumbai, where she was operated on 21 February.
"In normal babies, the pressure in the lungs normalises within a week of birth. In Aditi's case, the pure blood was flowing away from the heart. It resulted in frequent and silent heart attacks that damaged heart muscles," said Dr Shivaprakash, head of the paediatric heart centre, "It is a delicate surgery as we are dealing with tubes of 1-2mm in size, and the baby's heart function down to 10-15%."
About nine of 10 children with this disease do not survive more a year of developing symptoms as the heart functions decline fast.
Aditi's ejection fraction, which indicated how well the heart was pumping blood, was critically low at 15 per cent.
Normal hearts her age have 65 per cent. ''At such a low rate, a child can suffer heart attacks every three days,'' said Prakash, The Indian Express reported.
The reason Aditi survived was because her parents wasted no time and were able to able to get her operated by borrowing money from relatives. It cost them Rs 3 lakh.
