Righab Hamdan

Cutting-edge technology in treating cardiovascular diseases

By Righab Hamdan, MD, MSc, Specialist Cardiologist Clemenceau Medical Center (CMC) Dubai

“We are proud and delighted at Clemenceau Medical Center Hospital of Dubai to receive our cardiac patients in a state-of-the-art cardiology department and provide them with the newest innovations and medical experience“

Cardiovascular death remains the first cause of death worldwide in both males and females. Tremendous advancement in the cardiovascular field has been witnessed.  

New cutting-edge technologies are nowadays available in the different cardiovascular fields mainly in:

• Interventional cardiology
• Electrophysiology which is specialty managing cardiac arrhythmias
• Cardiovascular surgery: although the need for open heart surgery has decreased significantly with the advances in interventional cardiology, cardiac surgery remains one of the most life-saving therapies available, it has also witnessed improvement in the surgical techniques, especially in the assist devices area or artificial hearts implantation

The reasons of cardiovascular diseases are not always detectable, nevertheless there are five primary cardiovascular risk factors well established in the development of atherosclerosis or arteries blockage and infarction. These factors include cigarettes smoking, close family history of coronary artery disease, hypertension or high blood pressure, high blood cholesterol level, and diabetes. There are secondary risk factors such as sedentary lifestyle and obesity. Beside these risk factors involved in atherosclerosis formation there is other cardiac abnormalities not related to arterial blockage such as valvular heart disease that might result from rheumatic disease in childhood or from aging, in addition to heart muscle disease that can be familial, or result from viral illness, pregnancy …

The best way to prevent cardiovascular diseases is to screen and control the cardiovascular risk factors, have a healthy lifestyle, smoking cessation and routine cardiac check-up in healthy individuals at risk. 

Interventional cardiology is a revolutionary specialty in cardiology, it was directly responsible for an important decrease in cardiovascular mortality including sudden cardiac death, through the years as well as significant improvement in the patient’s outcome and quality of life.

Interventional cardiology treats the blockage in the coronary arteries with direct balloon angioplasty and stent implantation, which will reopen the diseased artery without the need of open heart surgery. The novelties in this field include treating even the most difficult arteries such as totally essential arteries (left main artery previously treated only by bypass surgery), occluded arteries, very calcified arteries in addition to patients with previous bypass surgeries who have recurrent blockage. 

This fundamental impact of interventional cardiology on human lives expanded in the last decades beyond treating the arteries alone, it developed to treat structural heart diseases interventionally, which means treating the most common valvular heart disease without surgery especially for patients in whom the surgery is not feasible or deemed at high surgical risk, two major techniques are now well established and are commonly  used worldwide: the TAVI technique or the changing of the aortic valve percutaneously for severely narrowed aortic valve  and mitral clip technique which means the repair of mitral valve regurgitation also without the need of surgery.

We are proud and delighted at Clemenceau medical center hospital of Dubai to receive our cardiac patients in a state-of-the-art cardiology department and provide them with the newest innovations and medical experience.