Sri Lanka’s first-ever Human Heart Valve and Tissue Bank at the Lady Ridgeway Hospital (LRH) for Children will help save the lives of many children suffering from congenital heart diseases

By Kumudini Hettiarachchi

All set. Very soon Sri Lanka’s first-ever Human Heart Valve and Tissue Bank at the Lady Ridgeway Hospital (LRH) for Children in Colombo will be fully functional.

“We already have about 12 human valves in storage and in a month or two will be able to graft them in very ill children with congenital (present at birth) heart disease,” says Paediatric Cardiologist Dr. Duminda Samarasinghe whose dream this has been for a very long time.

These valves will help save many lives, MediScene learns, and the LRH team, which includes Paediatric Cardiologists and Paediatric Cardiac Surgeons, is hoping to undertake at least three or four surgeries a month.

Dr. Samarasinghe explains that they would initially start with

children suffering from Tetralogy of Fallot. In a majority of these patients, the pulmonary artery is not formed. (See box)

Commonly known as blue babies, these children suffer from cyanotic heart disease, which results in a low blood oxygen level. They form about 7-10% of those affected by congenital heart disease, it is learnt.

The calculation is simple but for the families who have children with congenital heart disease it is heart-breaking. With around 2,000 children being born with congenital heart disease (caused by a problem with the structure of the heart) every year in Sri Lanka, around 200 would be hit by cyanotic heart disease.

Congenital heart disease may involve the walls of the heart, the valves of the heart and the arteries and veins near the heart and disrupts the normal flow of blood through the heart, MediScene understands. Dr. Duminda Samarasinghe Doing it the right way.

Taking MediScene through the processes, Dr. Samarasinghe says that after obtaining consent ethically, from the closest family member, the team would harvest the heart of a dead person, within a few hours of death in a clean environment within the mortuary. The cadaveric donor should ideally be a child or young adult who has not had calcification (build-up of calcium) of the blood vessels or atherosclerosis (plaque build-up in the arteries).

The heart would be placed on the Static Transfer Box with double locks, from the side of the ‘least’ sterile room and passed into the ‘highly’ sterile inner room with filtered air in the Human Heart Valve and Tissue Bank. Here the heart will be dissected in a special Bio-safety Cabinet, harvesting the aortic valve, the aorta, the pulmonary artery and the pulmonary valve. These valves and vessels will also be measured with an accurate record being kept.

The harvested valves and vessels will then be kept in an incubator and treated with antibiotics to ensure that there are no bacterial or fungal growths and stored. The storage is in nitrogen vapour at a temperature of - 150°C under gradual gradient freezing, says Dr. Samarasinghe, explaining that they can then be kept for as long as five years.

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