Press releases

Released March 29, 1996
Yale-New Haven Hospital news release

Yale-New Haven First in State
to Perform New Heart Bypass Surgery

Heart surgeons at Yale-New Haven Hospital have used a new, less invasive technique for coronary bypass surgery for the first time in Connecticut.

The new surgical technique uses a three-inch incision, instead of splitting the breastbone to perform the surgery, and is known as minimally invasive coronary artery bypass graft (CABG) surgery. This procedure reduces patient discomfort and speeds recovery. Patients require only two to four days in the hospital instead of seven to 10 days.

This kind of bypass surgery is only for about 10 percent of patients with coronary artery disease, according to Dr. John Elefteriades, chief of cardiothoracic surgery at Yale-New Haven Hospital. The surgery is performed on a beating heart, without the use of a heart-lung machine, which helps reduce the risk of a stroke during surgery.

Coronary bypass surgery is performed on patients when arteries to the heart become clogged. In conventional bypass surgery, an artery from the leg is removed and grafted to the heart. In this less invasive surgery, an artery which supplies blood to chest muscles is grafted to the left anterior descending (LAD) artery, the most important artery on the heart which is close to the wall of the chest.

While nearly 400,000 conventional coronary bypass procedures are performed each year in the United States, only about 400 have been done worldwide using the less invasive bypass technique, according to the Cardiology Preeminence Roundtable.

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