MUSCAT: A medical team specialising in interventional electrocardiography at the Royal Hospital succeeded, for the first time in the Sultanate of Oman, in performing complex pacemaker implantation for a patient.

The patient suffered from a defect in the electrical connection between the atria and ventricles after an open-heart operation to change the tricuspid valve on the right side of the heart.

Dr. Najeeb bin Zahran Al-Rawahi, Senior Consultant of Interventional Electrocardiology at the National Center for Cardiac Medicine and Head of the medical team said in a statement, “The accuracy of the operation lies in the need to insert the wire conducting electricity into the left ventricle through the branches of the coronary sinus that drains into the right atrium. The operation was carried out through a small incision of no more than 5 centimetres and without the need for general anaesthesia and took an hour and a half.

He explained that most of the time the operation is performed through an incision in the chest cage and under general anaesthesia, and the wire is fixed to the outer wall of the heart, pointing out that the medical team included doctors, nurses and technicians from the Department of Anaesthesia and Cardiac Catheterisation at the National Center for Cardiac Medicine and Surgery at the Royal Hospital.