A doctor at the Jakaya Kikwete Cardiac Institute, Dr Sulender Kuboja monitors the progress of a child who underwent the pacemaker surgery yesterday.
What you need to know:
Medics at the Jakaya Kikwete Cardiac Institute successfully inserted pacemaker on child from Arusha whose heart had lost its natural electrical conduction
Dar es Salaam. In a rare surgery, doctors at the Jakaya Kikwete Cardiac Institute (JKCI) yesterday implanted an artificial pacemaker in the heart of a six-year-old girl from Arusha.
Led by cardiologists from the University of Virginia in the US, the medics performed the procedure on the child whose heart had lost its natural electrical conduction.
Inserting the pacemaker was a first in Tanzania whose ability to treat heart patients and carry out surgeries has been boosted by the establishment of the JKCI.
Tanzania’s first paediatric heart surgeon, Dr Godwine Sharau, said the procedure required major heart surgery, contrary to when it would have been performed on an adult.
He said: “If this was done on an adult, the procedure would not require surgery.’’
He noted that most of the procedures carried out previously involved adults.
The child, whose name cannot be revealed now for ethical reasons, was diagnosed recently with the rare heart condition, known medically as Congenital Heart Block (CHB), necessitating the surgical procedure.
When the girl was referred from lower level health facilities in Arusha to the JKCI for early diagnosis, her medical tests revealed that her heart was beating irregularly, according to Dr Peter Kisenge, the Acting Director of the JKCI.
Dr Kisenge was also one of the local specialists performing the procedure.
Congenital heart block is a rare disorder and it has an incidence of about 1 in 22,000 live births, according to medical sources.
Dr Kisenge noted that it occurs mostly in adults over 60 years. There is a very minimal chance for a disease to occur in children, he added.
