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1 week ago | 
answers.childrenshospital.org | Albert McKeon
When Mikolaj “Mickey” Karski’s family traveled from Poland to Boston to get him heart care, they weren’t thinking about pressure-volume (PV) loops. His parents simply wanted him to receive treatment for a complex condition that he couldn’t get back home. Little did they know the mathematical computational power of those PV loops would play a large role in doing just that.
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1 week ago | 
medicalxpress.com | Albert McKeon
When considering whether a child who has a single-ventricle heart defect would benefit more from biventricular repair or the Fontan procedure, heart specialists have lacked a key tool to guide them: data that shows possible long-term health risks of each surgical option.
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4 weeks ago | 
answers.childrenshospital.org | Albert McKeon
When considering whether a child who has a single-ventricle heart defect would benefit more from biventricular repair or the Fontan procedure, heart specialists have lacked a key tool to guide them: data that shows possible long-term health risks of each surgical option.
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2 months ago | 
answers.childrenshospital.org | Albert McKeon
It’s easy to think of the heart as a common denominator — everyone has one — but no two hearts are alike. Every heart is different. Every heart has a story. For many children and adults, that story includes coming to Boston Children’s for specialized heart care. Some were born with complex congenital heart defects, while others acquired a serious heart condition after birth.
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2 months ago | 
answers.childrenshospital.org | Albert McKeon
The double-switch operation corrects the congenital reversal of the heart’s ventricles and its two main arteries. It’s a practical way of putting the ventricles into the position they belong so that children with congenitally corrected transposition of the great arteries (CC-TGA) can benefit from enhanced circulation. Surgery, though, doesn’t come without risks.
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2 months ago | 
medicalxpress.com | Albert McKeon
Research by Boston Children's validates an innovative approach to mapping the heart's invisible conduction tissue during surgery. Research data from separate studies show that using electrophysiology tools to avoid the inadvertent injury of unseeable conduction tissue has drastically reduced postoperative heart block—and the need for a pacemaker—in the treatment of several congenital heart defects (CHDs).
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Jan 23, 2025 | 
answers.childrenshospital.org | Albert McKeon
New research by Boston Children’s validates an innovative approach to mapping the heart’s invisible conduction tissue during surgery. Key takeawaysUsing a catheter to map unseen conduction tissue drastically reduces heart block during biventricular repair surgeries for several heart conditions. Conduction tissue was identified in 96 percent of patients who were mapped.
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Jan 16, 2025 | 
answers.childrenshospital.org | Albert McKeon
By the time she was a year old, Everly Parisee was frequently wheezing. Then she had trouble swallowing foods. Her parents sought help from local pediatricians and specialists, who, in turn, couldn’t pinpoint a diagnosis. It turns out Everly had a type of vascular ring — a rare congenital defect that can constrict critical parts of the respiratory and digestive systems and often isn’t detected until after birth. But it took more than a year to reach that diagnosis.
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Jan 12, 2025 | 
answers.childrenshospital.org | Albert McKeon
John Kennedy, MD, MSc, remembers the relative simplicity of his first genetic mapping project. In a Harvard Medical School lab, he helped map a gene for the neurological disease mucolipidosis type IV in less than a year. “I was fresh out of college. I thought with the global momentum of the Human Genome Project, we were going to quickly map every gene. We were going to know that this problem here causes this disease, for almost every disease.
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Nov 24, 2024 | 
answers.childrenshospital.org | Albert McKeon
For years, researchers and clinicians have been trying to find a way to rapidly deliver oxygen to patients when traditional means of oxygenation are difficult or ineffective during critical moments of cardiac or respiratory arrest. Sometimes, hypoxemia caused by airway obstruction or lung disease can be so severe that methods to boost low-oxygen levels (including the placement of a breathing tube) are ineffective. A patient can have cardiac arrest, potentially leading to severe organ damage.
