A 2-month old infant, which is a one of the twins delivered with rare heart condition of Double Aortic Arch was successfully operated upon by a city based hospital and saved it from the jaws of death.

The 2-kg child, born to a woman after undergoing infertility treatment, was admitted to Sri Ramakrishna Hospital with complaints of difficulty in breathing and continuous vomiting since birth.

As the child’s condition was deteriorating and losing weight, it was evaluated by Pediatric Cardiologist Dr. Devaprasath and ECG and CT scan showed that the child was having a rare heart condition – Double Aortic Arch, a hospital release said today.

Normally in humans, there is a single major blood vessel called Aorta, which comes out of the heart and turns to the left side and supplies oxygen rich blood to whole of the body. This is called as left aortic arch and is a normal occurrence.

Occurrence of double aortic arch is extremely rare and occurs only in 0.5 to one per cent of all cardiac birth defects and seen once in a few million live births.

This baby had an extra blood vessel called Right aortic Arch which was also coming out of the heart connecting to the normal Left Aortic Arch and forming a ring.

This ring formed by the extra blood vessel was encasing the trachea (wind pipe) and oesophagus (food pipe) thereby causing severe a compression of both these structures. The symptoms of the child were due to the compression of the food and wind pipe.

Since the child would die without the surgery, which was challenging given the size of the baby and complex anatomy, a team of doctors opened the left side of the baby’s chest through a limited incision.

Access was gained to the extra blood vessel which was compressing the wind and food pipes and after identifyng the extra blood vessel, it was divided and removed thereby relieving the compression.

The child was discharged on seventh post operative day and the child is symptom free and gaining weight, bringing back the smiles on parent’s faces.