Investigating why some coronary artery disease patients don’t benefit from bypass surgery

Predictors of functional recovery from surgical revascularisation of poor ventricles(Dr Andreas Seraphim)

Heart failure affects over half a million people in the UK. Often, it’s caused by coronary heart disease, when the arteries supplying the heart muscle become narrowed or blocked. One of the most effective treatments for coronary heart disease is bypass surgery to help restore blood flow to the affected area of the heart. Bypass surgery is when a healthy blood vessel is stitched into the heart’s circulation to ‘bypass’ a stretch of diseased artery. However, whilst it is a very well established procedure, the grafted blood vessels can fail in the weeks and months after surgery. Sometimes, heart damage can also occur during the operation. Dr Charlotte Manisty and her team at University College London intend to find out which factors contribute to the poor recovery in patients after surgery. They will use high-tech imaging to study the heart in 100 people with coronary artery disease, before and after bypass surgery. They will look for grafts that have been blocked, investigate what causes heart damage during surgery, and look at how the heart recovers. By better understanding these processes, they hope to find ways to improve bypass surgery and could also help doctors to consider other treatments for patients who are unlikely to benefit from an operation.