Daily Times

Karachi: The National Institute of Cardiovascular Diseases (NICVD), has started Pakistan’s first pediatric cardiac electrophysiology Programme. The first procedure has successfully performed on an eight-year-old boy.

The child had repeated attacks of fast heart rates of up to 200 beats per minute. After the procedure, he was permanently cured. NICVD Executive Director Prof Nadeem Qamar told on Saturday that Dr. Mohammad Mohsin, trained in pediatric cardiology and followed it with two years of training at the University of Alberta in Canada and has been hired by the NICVD to start the first pediatric cardiac electrophysiology programme in Pakistan.

The NICVD director said that this programme is a great achievement and NICVD has become one of the advanced cardiac care hospitals in the world. The institute has also uploaded a detailed video about this programme on its Twitter account.

Dr. Muhammad Mohsin said that heart problems in which the heart beats too fast or too slow are not uncommon in children. He said, highly specialized doctors can cure these children by electrophysiology, and as there were no pediatric electrophysiologists in Pakistan, these children could not be adequately treated until now.

He further added that these complex procedures require dedicated teamwork between referring cardiologists, pediatric cardiologists, technologists, anesthetists, and electrophysiology physicians and all of them are available in NICVD.

The institute could previously only treat adult patients with catheter-based treatments but with this new service children suffering from these conditions for years could now also be cured, Dr. Azam Shafquat the head of cardiac electrophysiology at the NICVD, said.