Patient’s life saved by injection of alcohol into the heart

DOCTORS have saved a patient’s life – by killing off part of his heart with neat alcohol.

Medics used the rare treatment to induce a controlled heart attack.

Cardiologist Dr Tom Johnson said his patient, Ronald Aldom, would never have left the Bristol Heart Institute if his condition could not have been treated.

The 77-year-old was suffering from a life-threatening heart rhythm called ventricular tachycardia (VT), which occurred as a result of a previous heart attack.

A team of surgeons tried to treat the condition using standard procedures, but were unable to safely perform them.

The team decided to treat Mr Aldom, from Portishead near Bristol, with “ethanol ablation”. It has only been conducted a handful of times in the UK to treat VT, Dr Johnson said.

The procedure involves passing a catheter to the heart from the groin which identifies which part of the heart the dangerous rhythms are coming from.

A tiny balloon is then blown up in the heart artery supplying that area and a small amount of absolute alcohol is injected into the artery to produce a small controlled heart attack.

This kills the area of the heart muscle causing the problem, allowing the heart’s rhythm to return to normal.

Mr Aldom was admitted to hospital after his implantable defibrillator (ICD) gave him a “thunderstorm of shocks”. He said: “I had an ICD fitted about ten years ago after I had a double by-pass operation at the hospital. The device gives my heart a shock when the rhythm becomes abnormal; however, I had about 30 shocks and knew there was something wrong.”

Dr Johnson, an interventional cardiologist, said: “The defibrillator is there to try and prevent you from dropping dead – it listens out for the heart doing unusual things, like going very, very fast, and firstly it will try and pace you out of that rhythm.

“If that fails it will actually illicit a shock of energy across the heart which hopefully straightens things out. When it does go off it is like being kicked in the chest.”

Dr Johnson said the medical team tried to treat Mr Aldom’s new heart problem with medication and “electrical ablation” to try and burn away the area of muscle which was generating the irregular heartbeats.

But they were unable to perform the procedures – so they decided to treat Mr Aldom with ethanol ablation. “The alternative, unfortunately, was that he was going to die from his irregular heart rhythm,” Dr Johnson said.

The cardiologist has previously performed the procedure for patients with hypertrophic cardiomyopathy – when the heart muscle becomes thick – but this was his first use of the procedure to treat VT. “The patient wasn’t going to leave hospital unless something was done. There was no other option,” he said.

Mr Aldom said: “I was out of hospital within about three days. I think it’s wonderful that the doctors tried everything to help me. If they hadn’t have done this I wouldn’t be here now.”