Wednesday, May 11, 2011

New Adult Congential Heart Disease Clinic for Miami's Mount Sinai

It was a merging of the best of the North and the South: Miami's Mount Sinai Medical Center and New York's Columbia University joined together to form a partnership and just opened a new congenital heart disease (CHD) clinic specifically for adults.  The doctors at the Mount Sinai Institute cardiology Florida are some of the most reputably skilled in America in their practice and research studies.  One such study involved a new minimally invasive cardiac surgery technique to repair heart valves that is suitable for patients of all ages.  

The innovative new clinic is unique in that is specializes in the treatment of adults with congenital heart disease, rather than children.  Most cardiologists who specialize in CHD are pediatricians, as it actually forms early in fetal development.  Before the 1970s,  many children with CHD did not survive.  Now cardiac medical technology has advanced so much that children affected by this structural heart disease have a very high percentage rate opportunity to grow into adults.  According to WebMD, CHD affects 8-10 out of every 1,000 children and about 50,000 adults have the disease. 

The cardiologists Florida of the Mount Sinai Heart Institute have designed a program that treats patients after they've reached adulthood.  Treating adults patients with with congenital heart disease requires a lot of skill in the cardiac field because the heart changes after childhood surgery and adult treatment frequently requires correcting problems caused by complications such as pulmonary hypertension and and valve regurgitation.  The Heart Institute are actually enables patients to have access to their pediatric cardiologist they had as a child as well as their new adult one.  "Traditionally, pediatric cardiologists followed their adult patients because there were very few adult cardiologists familiar with their anatomy and management," states Dr. Juan-Carlos Brenes, the co-director of the Echocardiography Laboratory of Mount Sinai.  "Today, adult congenital heart specialists can bridge the gap between pediatric and adult cardiology, and are often best suited to manage difficult adult-related problems such as complex arrhythmias and chronic heart failure."

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