A boy’s life has been saved after he became the first child in the UK to have an angioplasty for heart failure – a procedure usually reserved for adults with heart conditions.
Elliot Atkins’s parents were told that without action he would be unlikely to survive after he was diagnosed with heart failure and a “one in a million” condition called middle aortic syndrome.
But medics at Great Ormond Street Hospital (Gosh) decided to give him an angioplasty to help make him fit enough to be given life-saving surgery.
Gosh said the angioplasty reversed Elliot’s heart failure – a condition previously considered irreversible – making it possible for him to receive a vital operation.
Doctors said Elliot is the first child in the UK to be given an angioplasty for heart failure.
There are also no other documented cases, meaning he could be the first child ever to be given the intervention for heart failure.
Elliot, now seven, is today “running around with his friends and happy” and training for his school sports day, his mother said.
His parents Amy Govier and Thomas Atkins, both 29, realised something was wrong when Elliot was 11 months old when he became seriously unwell following a chest infection.
Ms Govier, who works for a care company, said Elliot was born healthy at Musgrove Park Hospital in Taunton, Somerset.
But after developing a chest infection four weeks before his first birthday, he was struggling to breathe and a scan revealed his heart was enlarged.
He was taken to the Bristol Royal Hospital for Children where further tests concluded Elliot was in heart failure, that his blood pressure was dangerously high, and the aorta – the large tube that connects the heart to the rest of the body – was narrowed.
“They couldn’t work out why, because his symptoms weren’t adding up,” Ms Govier told the Press Association.
Elliot was referred to Great Ormond Street, where he was also diagnosed with middle aortic syndrome, which leads to the aorta, the body’s main blood vessel, and vessels bringing blood to kidneys to become severely narrowed.
This can significantly reduce blood flow, raise blood pressure, and place extreme strain on the heart, kidneys, brain and eyes.
With such advanced heart failure, major surgery was initially considered too risky for Elliot until his medical team decided to try a never before performed intervention in children with heart failure.
Doctors from different specialties across the world-renowned children’s hospital discussed giving Elliot an angioplasty to widen his blood vessels and improve his blood pressure control, helping his heart grow strong enough to eventually have surgery.
While angioplasty is a routine treatment in adults, it has not traditionally been considered possible for children with severe heart failure.
The technique involves guiding a small balloon into narrowed blood vessels and inflating it to widen them, which improves blood flow.
Mr Atkins, a military medic, told PA that because the procedure had not been performed in a child with heart failure before, “there was nothing that we could go and look at and read”.
He added: “It meant we couldn’t Google anything to reassure ourselves that this was going to be okay.
“There was stuff on angioplasty, sure, but the patient pool was much, much older, so we knew that the procedure itself was fairly routine, but the fact that it was on a child in Elliot’s condition… we were at a loss really.
“I don’t know, maybe that helped a little bit, ignorance being a bliss.
“But we’d had a lot of discussions with the angioplasty surgeons, the vascular surgeons, and they had put our minds at ease quite well, as well as everyone else reminding us that Elliot’s behaviour wasn’t matching his clinical picture.”
Ms Govier added: “I think a lot of it was just pure horror and shock.”
A series of angioplasty procedures – six by the age of two – helped Elliot become strong enough to withstand a long and complex operation – an aortic bypass graft with a transplant of a single kidney.
The surgery created a new route for blood flow around the narrowed section of Elliot’s aorta using a specially designed synthetic graft, while relocating his kidney to improve its blood supply and help control his blood pressure.
Elliot, who now lives with his parents and sister Miya in Colchester, Essex, had the operation last July.
“All of the angioplasties led up to a big surgery that he had July last year, which he wouldn’t have made it to without the angioplasties, and now he’s running around happy, can keep up with his friends,” Ms Govier told PA.
“He just knows he’s got this scar on his tummy, and that’s it.
“He is very excited for sports day – they do a class race, which he’s very excited for, and there’s some ball skills, and there’s some throwing that he’s just really excited for all of it.
“He’s just a bundle of joy, he always tries to make people laugh.”
Since Elliot’s first angioplasty in 2020, the teams at Gosh have gone on to perform angioplasty procedures for other children in heart failure.
Dr Jelena Stojanovic, Elliot’s clinician and lead for the kidney transplant and renovascular service, said: “Following Elliot’s intervention, we have successfully performed this intervention over several other children who will refer to us not from other centres in the UK but also from abroad.
“This is a very rare condition, and the numbers on its own will be small, but what is important is… that the children can be offered the chance to survive.
“When we as a team look at him today, we see a child who has been given an opportunity that simply would have not existed without the treatment and the extraordinary efforts of the teams involved in his care.
“He’s doing remarkably well, he’s taking fewer medications, his quality of life has improved significantly, and he’s actually back to doing the activities that every child of his age should be able to enjoy.
“At Gosh, our teams work together to care for children with the rarest and most complex conditions, this means we often use our collective expertise to push the boundaries of what is possible and treat the elsewhere untreatable conditions.”
