First UK child angioplasty reverses boy’s heart failure

Elliot Atkins is now thriving | Credit: Chris Radburn/PA Media

By Ella Pickover, PA Media and Doctors.net.uk

For the first time in the UK, a team at Great Ormond Street Hospital used angioplasty to reverse severe heart failure in a child – and has since extended the approach to treat several other children.

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 or midaortic syndrome.

But medical staff 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, making it possible for him to receive a vital operation. 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.