News Releases

Heart Surgical Team Sets Pace for Off-Pump Bypass

Houston, Texas, March 3, 2004 – A highly skilled cardiovascular team at Memorial Hermann Memorial City Hospital recently achieved a national milestone when it performed its 1,200th “off-pump” or “beating-heart” bypass surgery.

While most cardiovascular surgeons around the country perform only 10 to 15 percent of open-heart surgeries on a beating heart, Miguel Gomez, M.D. and Donald Gibson, M.D. perform 97 percent of their bypass cases off-pump. The team reports excellent outcomes in the 1,200 patients they have treated since 1999.

“We aim for outstanding results and achieve them with an aggressive approach which regards every patient referred to us a candidate for off-pump bypass,” says Gomez.

Unlike the traditional procedure, which literally stops the patient’s heart and connects them to a heart-lung machine, the off-pump technique immobilizes only the small section of the heart that requires surgical modification.

The medical world has long been aware that heart-lung machines place people at risk of potentially fatal complications, which include stroke, abnormal rhythms, lung problems and fluid retention.

Contrasting the two techniques, clinical studies worldwide and the Memorial Hermann team’s own retrospective study demonstrate significant benefits for patients using the off-pump procedure. “They recover faster, spend less time on the ventilator, experience fewer complications, have lower mortality and stroke rates and a shorter post-operative length of stay,” says Gomez. “We’ve had off-pump patients back home just two days after surgery, which is unheard of with conventional bypass.”

Gomez says off-pump bypass “keeps a patient in a more physiologically natural state, as their own heart continues circulating blood through their body, and eliminates the trauma and risk associated with stopping and restarting a heart to connect a patient to the heart-lung machine.”

Each year, an estimated half-million Americans undergo heart bypass surgery. Studies find that while more than 95 percent of the cases are successful, there remain serious side effects and occasional deaths – many resulting not from the surgery itself, but from the use of the heart-lung machine.

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