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Eur J Cardiothorac Surg 1999;15:12-19
© 1999 Elsevier Science NL

Partial left ventriculectomy – the Batista procedure ¹

Hospital Angelina Caron, 83, 430-000 Campina Grand do Sul, Brazil

^* Tel.: +55-41-367-6505; fax: +55-41-335-8227.

The first 300 words of the full text of this article appear below.

	Introduction

 
Heart transplantation is a good option for heart failure, but there are not many organ donors; even in the most developed countries of the world, only 1% of those who need heart transplantation will receive it. The situation is even worse in Brazil. So I would like to discuss a procedure I developed for the 99% of patients who do not have access to heart transplantation, which is the partial left ventriculectomy (PLV). Its concept is that rather than operating on the heart, I am operating on its diameter. If you look at the heart as a bad muscle, it does not make any sense to excise a piece of it in order to make it better because the heart needs more muscle. Why then does the patient improve? It has to do with the diameter.

Nature has been shaping the heart for 100 million years, which is a great deal of experience bringing it to where it is today. The snake heart is very tiny, and if it is placed beside a human heart and a buffalo heart, it is immediately recognized as a snake heart (Fig. 1 ). But if a computer image of the snake heart is enlarged to the size of the buffalo heart, you can no longer determine which is which. The ratio of mass to diameter is the same in both hearts. In fact, all hearts have the same ratio of mass to diameter, from the snake to the buffalo to the whale. Everything in nature, from strawberries to oranges to hearts, has the same ratio, regardless of its size.

View larger version (104K): [in this window] [in a new window]   Fig. 1. Comparison of heart size – snake, human, and buffalo.

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