A Message from Dr. Henry Walters, III, Chief of Cardiovascular Surgery at Children's Hospital of Michigan.

Clinical Research in the Department of Cardiovascular Research at                        Children's Hospital of Michigan

Over the years, many surgical treatments have been devised for various forms of congenital heart disease.  The goal of our clinical research efforts in the Department of Cardiovascular Surgery at Children’s Hospital of Michigan is to examine these various surgical strategies in order to accurately determine their efficacy, complication rate and mortality.  By critically examining the results of various different types of surgical therapies for congenital heart disease, we can better determine which is the best surgical therapy for a given congenital heart lesion and we can identify areas which require improvement.

Currently, the Department of Cardiovascular Surgery is participating in three separate multi-institutional studies in collaboration with the Congenital Heart Surgeons Society.  The subject of these studies include tricuspid atresia, right ventricular to pulmonary artery conduits and left ventricular outflow tract obstruction.

The Department is also currently studying a complex group of patients who are born with coarctation of the aorta and ventricular septal defect.  We are comparing two-staged repairs vs single-staged complete repairs.  We are also studying patients who have complete atrioventricular canal defect associated with a single ventricle. 

Finally, we maintain a large institutional database that allows us to continually monitor the results of all pediatric cardiac surgeries that are performed at Children’s Hospital of Michigan.  We also contribute this data to the Society of Thoracic Surgeons Congenital Heart Surgery Database Network and to the Aristotle Complexity Score Database.

This clinical research requires the exhaustive efforts of a totally dedicated full-time research associate in the Department of Cardiovascular Surgery as well as the efforts of Pediatric Cardiovascular Surgical Nurses, Residents and Fellows.  These clinical studies typically lead to presentations at regional and national meetings as well as to publications in peer-reviewed journals.  For example, our most recent completed clinical study was entitled “Efficacy of Intraluminal Pulmonary Artery Banding”.  This study was presented at the Western Thoracic Surgical Association meeting and was recently published in the Journal of Thoracic and Cardiovascular Surgery (J Thorac Cardiovasc Surg 2005; 129:544-50).