Dad saved by Baked Alaska heart surgery

A HEART attack patient has become the first in the UK to have a pioneering treatment known as the ‘Baked Alaska’.

Steve Jaggers’ internal body temperature was cooled dramatically while he was kept warm on the outside.

The chill reduces swelling and damage caused to heart tissue, similar to the way a cold compress helps heal a bruise by slowing blood flow to an injury.

The procedure – known as therapeutic hypothermia – mimics the clash of hot and cold in the classic dessert, which consists of ice cream baked in a meringue.

Mr Jaggers had the treatment while a surgeon fitted a stent in a blocked artery. His core temperature was reduced by almost 5C after a balloon filled with cold saline solution was threaded along a major blood vessel. At the same time he was kept warm on the outside with blankets to prevent shivering, which the body does involuntarily to raise its temperature.

Mr Jaggers, 50, who was awake throughout the procedure, said yesterday: ‘It was such a strange sensation. Inside I was cold. I felt like I was shivering inside but I wasn’t showing it. It was a bit of an out-ofbody experience.’

At present the procedure is only available at Basildon Hospital in Essex, which is conducting a trial on 50 people as part of an international study.

Mr Jaggers, a care home maintenance worker, was at home in Laindon, Essex, on July 6 when he felt a pain in his chest, which he dismissed as heartburn. He took indigestion tablets but was driven to hospital the next day after the symptoms persisted and spread down his arm.

Later that day a team at Basildon Hospital’s specialist Essex Cardiothoracic Centre (CTC) inserted a catheter containing a balloon into a major vein in his leg that carries blood to the heart.

A cool liquid was run into the balloon, causing the father-of-two’s body temperature to fall from the usual 36.5C to 32.5C within minutes. At one point it dropped to 31.7C. Having a core temperature of 35C or less normally leads to hypothermia and can cause death.

But Mr Jaggers was kept as warm as possible on the outside while a stent was fitted to open up the blocked artery that caused the heart attack. His temperature was then increased at the rate of 1C an hour.

This limited the amount of blood travelling through the damaged organ, minimising the injury often caused by the rapid re-flow of blood after a blockage is removed.

‘It felt like being abroad in the sun, where you get hotter and hotter,’ added Mr Jaggers, who has no history of heart trouble. ‘Now I feel completely fine. It’s like nothing has happened to me.’

The hospital is the only UK centre taking part in a worldwide randomised trial for the USdesigned ZOLL catheter.

Consultant cardiologist Dr Thomas Keeble said: ‘By cooling the patient before we open the artery we can protect the heart and significantly reduce the amount of heart damage. It is essential to do this quickly – we cool them from the inside but keep their outside warm, much like baked Alaska.’

MRI scans of the heart after five and 30 days will show how successful the treatment has been.