In Lviv, a 62-year-old resident from the Lviv region was saved from acute aortic dissection.

At the St. Panteleimon Hospital in Lviv, a team of cardiac surgeons from Lviv and Kyiv performed a complex surgery on 62-year-old resident of Lviv region, Volodymyr Oryshchak, who was diagnosed with acute aortic dissection extending to the branches of the aortic arch and the descending thoracic aorta. Until recently, such surgeries in Ukraine were only performed at the National Institute of Cardiovascular Surgery named after Mykola Amosov.

The patient had suffered from high blood pressure for over 20 years and was on medication for it. However, two months ago, he woke up feeling extremely unwell. Even in the fresh air, he did not feel any better. He barely made it back home. His wife checked his blood pressure, which turned out to be critically low – 60 over 80. His relatives called an ambulance, reported the hospital.

On the way to the hospital, paramedics connected the patient to oxygen, as his saturation was rapidly dropping and he was struggling to breathe. Upon arrival, cardiac surgeons immediately examined the patient and discovered a rare and life-threatening condition, specifically – acute aortic dissection extending to the branches of the aortic arch and the descending thoracic aorta. The main artery of the patient's circulatory system was severely damaged due to prolonged exposure to excessive pressure. The doctors did everything possible to stabilize the patient's condition and perform the complex surgery as quickly as possible.

“Considering the large area of dissection, we decided to conduct this extremely difficult intervention in collaboration with colleagues from the Amosov Institute. They are the only ones who independently perform such complex surgeries. This is the 27th intervention across Ukraine and the second in Lviv,” said Roman Domashych, head of the Heart and Vessels Center at the hospital.

The challenging surgery lasted 9 hours and was successful. “During the intervention, we removed the dissected ascending aorta along with the arch and placed an artificial prosthesis in its place. It consists of two parts: the first is a standard synthetic aortic prosthesis, and the second is an endograft that enters the ascending aorta and unfolds there. Next, we cut the vessels supplying blood to the head and upper limbs and installed an endoprosthesis in the descending aorta. To prevent a stroke, we connected the patient to a heart-lung machine during the surgery,” said cardiac surgeon Bohdan Hel.

According to the cardiac surgeons, the main difficulty of the operation was that after disconnecting the main vessels, they had to sequentially reconnect each one and check for blood supply. The critical patient was saved. A month after the surgery, he returned home.