Boy receives mechanical heart
WITH time running out, a desperately-ill 5-year-old Newcastle boy has made medical history by becoming the youngest patient in Africa to receive a lifesaving mechanical heart.
Weighing just 17kg at the time of his ground-breaking operation, Mnotho Mndebele is also one of the smallest and youngest patients in the world to have a heart ventricular assist device (HVAD) implanted to keep his severely damaged heart functioning.
The device is buying him time until a matching donor heart can be found for a heart transplant.
It will also enable him to grow stronger and gain much-needed weight, “so he will be healthy enough to undergo a heart transplant”, explained Dr Viljee Jonker, the cardiothoracic surgeon who led the implantation team.
Mnotho’s operation was carried out last month at the Mabong Heart Institute at the Netcare Sunninghill Hospital in Johannesburg.
It followed a similar operation on another Newcastle boy, 10-year-old Philasande Dladla, at the Netcare Christiaan Barnard Memorial Hospital in Cape Town a year ago.
At the time, Philasande, now 11, was the youngest patient in Africa to undergo the operation.
Mnotho was discharged from hospital on Monday and expected to stay in Gauteng for the next week or so before returning home.
He had suffered from dilated cardiomyopathy, a chronic disease of the heart muscle, in which the left ventricle becomes enlarged and weakened and is no long able to pump blood properly.” – Staff Reporter