New Delhi: Dog Complex heart condition treated successfully minimally invasive heart surgery here in a hospital Veterinarians It is claimed that this is the first such procedure performed by private practitioners in the Indian subcontinent. The seven-year-old beagle, Juliet, Mitral valve disease Dr Bhanu Dev Sharma, interventional cardiologist for small animals at Max PetZ Hospital, East of Kailash, said on Sunday that he has been performing this procedure for the last two years.

surgeons performed an operation Transcatheter Edge-to-edge repair (TEER) procedure using valve clamps on May 30.

“It is called a hybrid surgery because it is a combination of micro surgery and interventional procedure. The best part about this procedure is that it is minimally invasive as it is a beating heart procedure and not like an open heart surgery that requires a heart lung bypass machine,” Sharma said.

Sharma said that according to the pet’s parents, they had been giving Juliet heart-related medicines for the past one year.

He said he came to know about the procedure during his visit to the US, where the surgery was introduced at Colorado State University two years ago.

The pet dog was discharged in a stable medical condition just two days after the surgery.

Mitral valve disease is the most common heart disease in dogs in India as well as the rest of the world and accounts for 80 per cent of all heart diseases in dogs in India and across the world. This disease is also one of the leading causes of deaths in dogs, Sharma said.

“The only major treatment available as of now involves pharmacological therapy, which delays the onset of clinical symptoms and provides symptomatic relief for some time. It is not curative,” he said.

Open heart mitral valve repair surgery is not a very viable option due to the highly invasive nature of the procedure, and it is performed at very few centers in the world.

Sharma said, “TEER is completely an image guided procedure and is performed under trans oesophageal 4D echocardiography and fluoroscopy guidance in a beating heart. A small incision is made on the chest wall to reach the apex of the heart, following which the two leaflets of the diseased mitral valve are joined together through a catheter to reduce the leakage in the valve under the guidance of high-tech equipment.”

According to the veterinary hospital, Sharma’s team is the first in Asia and the second among private practitioners worldwide to successfully perform this procedure.

Sharma and his team of four doctors travelled to Shanghai last year to learn about the procedure.

Sharma said, “This procedure is similar in concept to the Mitra Clip procedure in humans, which has benefited and saved the lives of many people so far. The introduction of this surgery has brought a new ray of hope for dogs suffering from this very common heart disease.”