The Texas Heart Institute and the DeBakey Heart Center in Houston’s Texas Medical Center are two of the best cardiovascular surgical care facilities in the world. Yesterday, the Texas Heart Institute announced that the 12th and only living recipient of an experimental, self-contained mechanical heart called the AbioCor replacement heart underwent surgery to implant the device on Feb. 20 at its facility in Houston. The recipient of the AbioCor replacement heart is in critical but stable condition. This is the fifth patient to receive the device at Texas Heart Institute under the care of Dr. O.H. Frazier, chief of cardiopulmonary transplantation and director of surgical research at the Texas Heart Institute and chief of transplant services at St. Luke’s Episcopal Hospital. The AbioCor clinical trial began in July 2001.
In this related Chronicle article, several of Houston’s leading cardiologists discuss the merits of the increasingly popular “off-bump” heart bypass procedure in which the operation is done “off-pump” — i.e., without circulating the blood of the patient through a heart-lung machine. While some Houston doctors believe that the benefits of minimizing a patient’s recovery time are so great that they use the procedure almost exclusively, other surgeons are skeptical about the procedure’s ability to reduce the risk of stroke and other side effects.