A city doctor entered the Limca Book of Records for aborting a heart attack and performing the fastest angioplasty in straight 16 minutes as against the international standard of 90 minutes.
Dr Sanjay Rajdev, consultant cardiologist at Seven Hills Hospital achieved the feat by performing the feat on a 46-year-old executive of a multinational IT company, Rolta. “The patient came to us on December 10, 2011. He had complains of chest discomfort. We started conducting electrocardiograms (ECG),” said Dr Rajdev.
The procedure, took just 16 minutes (Door to Balloon Time or D2B Time) to treat the patient Rajendra Verma. Door-to-balloon time measures how long it takes before a heart attack patient receives primary percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI) or balloon angioplasty upon entering the door of the hospital.
“We were conducting ECGs every five minutes and it so happened that we could see that ECGs were becoming abnormal. He started to sweat too. We were suspecting this too would happen and we had the suspicion that he would have a heart attack so we had kept the operation theatre ready,” said Dr Rajdev.
Dr Rajdev, along with four others, performed the angioplasty and after the angioplasty, also put two stents to rule out future complications. “The angioplasty alone took 16 minutes, which is the international metric. If you add the stenting procedure, then in all we took 20 minutes.
In January 2012, Dr Rajdev applied for the Limca Book of Records. “Just a few days ago we received confirmation from the Limca Book of Records which ratified ours as the fastest D2B record.”