Which Shunt Best for Repairing Congenital Heart Defects?
A new study compares two surgical strategies for repairing the severely underdeveloped heart, the most common severe congenital heart defect. Infants born with a critically underdeveloped left side of their hearts require three surgeries to correct the problem. The first stage involves the Norwood Procedure, which is used to form a connection that delivers blood from the heart to the pulmonary arteries, to pick up oxygen. This can be done by two procedures; the traditional version uses a modified Blalock-Taussig shunt (MBTS), which connects the aorta the pulmonary artery; the modified procedure uses a right ventricle to pulmonary artery (RV-to-PA) shunt to connect the functioning right ventricle to the pulmonary artery. Researchers at the University of Michigan Medical School (Ann Arbor, USA) and other members of the international Pediatric Heart Network conducted a 15-center trial involving 555 infants (61% male) who were randomized to receive either the RV-to-PA shunt or MBTS procedu
