Lagos state residents and other Nigerians with a hole in the heart can now be treated without surgery in Lagos State University Teaching Hospital, LASUTH, as the hospital became the first public tertiary health institution in Nigeria to perform Ventricular Septal Defect, VSD closure.
The closure done at the hospital was a non-surgical repair of a hole-in-heart defect.
VSD is a type of heart procedure that closes a hole between the left and right ventricles of the heart.
The procedure was done on Tuesday, June 20, 2023, at the hospital’s Cardiac Catheterisation Laboratory.
Dr. Oluwaseye Oladimeji, a Consultant Interventional Cardiologist at LASUTH, who revealed in a post on Twitter on Tuesday, June 27, 2023, described the procedure as one being performed on patients born with a hole in the heart.
Dr Oladimeji, said with the new development, “patients now have options to open heart surgery.”
He further revealed that there are two ways to deal with holes in the heart: “One is to perform an open heart surgery, while the other way, is to do a non-surgical closure,” adding that the surgery “can be done without making an incision in the chest wall and the defect can be closed using a disc-like device.”
He also revealed that patients who undergo the procedure can be discharged two hours after.
The hospital, however, promised to continue to provide quality health solutions to the residents of Lagos.
The tertiary hospital has successfully carried out 120 cardiac procedures since the inception of the hospital’s Cardiac Catheterization Laboratory, in the second quarter of year 2022.
