Irish mother’s war on child heart defects
AN IRISH mother and Nasa engineers are working together to pioneer new prototype which could provide an alternative to transplants for children born with congenital heart defects.
US-based Marie Hatcher has already helped to make screening for critical CHDs mandatory in five states in America.
And the new Fontane blood pump prototype, due to be completed and ready for testing in the US in November, could help the one in every 100 babies born with CHD in Ireland every year.
Ms Hatcher – originally from Athboy, Co. Meath – is the chairman on a committee seeking to raise the remaining $350,000 (€305,000) needed for the prototype, developed by paediatric heart surgeon Dr Mark Rodefeld and Nasa engineers.
The Indianapolis doctor has been working for 15 years to develop the pump, which acts like another heart ventricle for children with CHD, pumping blood to the lungs and back. On his Facebook page, Dr Rodefeld says that ‘the only treatment really for these patients with this type of life-threatening CHD [a single ventricle heart defect] is a heart transplant’.
He added that children with one ventricle who receive a heart transplant only have an average survival rate of just five years.
However, Ms Hatcher said this prototype ‘will be a real alternative’ to a heart transplant.
‘There’s a real buzz about it in the States,’ she added.
Ms Hatcher, along with her husband Mike, began campaigning to help children with CHDs after her son Matthew was born with the condition.
Founded in 2011, their foundation Matthew’s Hearts of Hope now raises up to $100,000 (€87,000) a year to help fund research projects into CHDs.
During a visit home to Athboy this week, she said: ‘One in four babies born with CHD in the US will pass away while waiting for a heart transplant. More children die from CHD each year in the States than are diagnosed with cancer.’
Matthew, nine, has had four open-heart surgeries since birth as well as a further operation to reroute the way his blood flows around his body. ‘He takes up to 12 meds a day but thankfully he is doing great in school, plays soccer and leads a relatively normal life,’ said his mother.
Ms Hatcher and her husband Mike’s campaign led to a new law in the state of Connecticut that every newborn be screened for CHDs. It was also passed in Vermont, Rhode Island, Massachusetts and New York.
Here in Ireland, the National Children’s Heart Centre at Our Lady’s Children’s Hospital in Crumlin confirmed that ‘one in every 100 babies’ born in the country ‘is born with a congenital heart defect, and all come to Crumlin to be operated on’.
‘The Heart Centre sees in the region of 10,000 children as outpatients and operates on about 500 of these children annually,’ it added.