Heart surgeon cures five problems in one go

Doctors in the United States have performed unprecedented surgery in which they corrected five damaged areas of a patient's heart during the same operation. As a result the man's life expectancy has been extended from just six months to another 15 years.

"The operation was unprecedented," said Dr Irvin Krukenkamp, chief of cardiothoracic surgery at New York's Stony Brook University Hospital, who led the 10-strong operating team.

"While the repairs we made were standard fare, no one has ever done them all at once. Some of the techniques we used were very new.

"To my knowledge no other surgeon has attempted to surgically cure three serious heart defects at once before, and repairing five at once is unheard of, uniquely complicated and challenging."

When the patient, 69-year-old Salvatore Tomasi, entered hospital he could barely walk from his bed to the bathroom.

Dr Krukenkamp's team had to perform a bypass to relieve a blocked coronary artery, replace a damaged aortic valve, patch a hole between the heart's two chambers, repair a leaky bicuspid valve and treat the unbalanced beating rhythm in the upper chambers.

The surgeon admitted that there was a serious risk attached to the operation: each of the five procedures alone carries a mortality risk of up to four per cent.

Mr Tomasi, who appeared yesterday at a press conference in New York where details of the operation were revealed, left hospital on December 31.

"I'm so happy to be alive," he said. "I had no idea how seriously sick I was."