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| Vol. 22, No. 20 |
| November 1, 2000 |
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Healing Tiny Hearts By STEVE SIEVERT Texas Children's Hospital
Unraveling the mystery of the tiniest heart problem is a labor of love for Dr. Nancy Ayres. As director of the echocardiography laboratory at Texas Children's Hospital, the cardiologist leads a cadre of specialists who perform 9,500 to 10,000 echoes a year. An echo - short for echocardiogram - is a procedure which uses ultrasound technology to provide pictures of the heart. Ayres, a master at her specialty, is quick to point out the technique's advantages. "An echocardiogram can determine if there is a heart defect," she explained. "Once a child is determined to have a heart problem, an echocardiogram can track how the heart problem is changing with the child's growth. Some problems may progress, remain unchanged or simply go away. Many congenital cardiac defects require surgery, and a cardiologist can determine which defects require surgery by performing a physical exam, in conjunction with tests such as an echocardiogram." Texas Children's echocardiography laboratory is one of 13 pediatric labs in the United States that is certified and accredited for children by the Intersocietal Commission for the Accreditation of Echocardiography Laboratories. In fact, Texas Children's houses the only lab in Texas - as well as the Southwest region of the country - to hold this distinction. "When a child has a heart problem, it's best to come to a center that handles a high volume of patients and has a large amount of experience and the appropriate equipment to handle all the needs," said Ayres. Ayres leaves no doubt that Texas Children's - the nation's largest pediatric specialty hospital - is such a place. "Families overwhelmed by the size of the hospital, the number of personnel, the sheer number of people, can look around and know their child is receiving the very best care," she said. "The reality at Texas Children's is that each patient gets a tremendous amount of experience. You may meet different people along the way, but each child receives the best care for his or her problem. In our area, we have a wide variety of experience in performing, reading and interpreting echoes. Cases are reviewed by many people, so different ideas and concepts come to mind in our quest to give the individual child the most successful treatment." Much of Ayres' work is diagnosis in utero, and she predicts echocardiography will make it feasible one day to rewrite the natural history of severe cardiac problems seen in early pregnancy. "By defining these problems and intervening with therapeutic modalities, it will perhaps change the outcome of some very tragic conditions that infants are born with," she said. "Without prenatal cardiac imaging, parents do not know there is a cardiac problem, and doctors are not prepared for the baby with congenital heart defects."
©2006 Texas Medical Center E-Mail: tmcinfo@texmedctr.tmc.edu URL: http://www.tmc.edu/tmcnews/11_01_00/page_08.html |
