Heart Surgery

For some heart patients, surgery is the best treatment option currently available.

Surgical techniques have improved a great deal over the years as our understanding of heart conditions grows.

Research remains vital to help us reduce the risk and trauma of surgery, as well as improve ways to replace surgical procedures with alternatives.

Positive steps for patient care

The BHF has supported important innovations in patient care during coronary heart disease surgery for several decades. In the 1970s one in 10 patients died following surgery compared with nearer one in 100 today.

Protecting the heart during surgery

In the 1970s the BHF and Wellcome Trust funded a team from St Thomas’ Hospital to develop a way to protect the heart while its blood supply is cut off during surgery.

The ‘St Thomas' Hospital Cardioplegic Solution’ is a liquid mixture that can preserve and protect the heart, giving surgeons more time to operate safely.

The solution has been used in operating theatres around the world and has helped thousands of hearts recover from surgery. 

Heart transplant success

The pioneering BHF-funded research of Professors Sir Magdi Yacoub and Sir Terence English in the 1980s has played a big part in making heart transplantation a surgical success story.

Today, half of the hearts transplanted a decade ago are still going strong for people who would otherwise have had only months to live.

Beating heart surgery

BHF Professor Gianni Angelini in Bristol has developed techniques allowing the heart to keeping beating during coronary artery bypass operations.

Short-term, this showed fewer post-surgery complications for patients. The BHF continues to support Angelini to assess the benefits longer term for heart patients.

What next?

Heart transplant is a successful procedure, but transplant patients must take medicines to control their immune responses against their new ‘foreign’ heart, leaving them more vulnerable to illness.

BHF are funding projects aiming to reveal how to override this rejection of the new organ, to help patients stay healthy for longer.

Our scientists lead the field in cutting-edge imaging techniques that will enable doctors to investigate heart conditions, diagnose and treat more patients without the need for an operation.

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