Between June 12 and 14, Las Palmas de Gran Canaria hosted haemodynamicists and nurses from the field of Cardiology. The Alfredo Kraus Auditorium was the venue for the thirty-fifth edition of the Congress of Interventional Cardiology. The last one held in the Canary archipelago was 20 years ago, so the return is celebrated by the island doctors. “It is the recognition of the scientific level that has been earned throughout the archipelago with a level of Interventional Cardiology on par with all of Spain, comparable to the entire peninsula,” indicated the assistant and head of the Interventional Cardiology Section. from the Doctor José Molina Orosa University Hospital of Lanzarote, Carlos Vásquez.
Thus, for three days, the Canary Islands capital was the scene of conversations between professionals in the specialty about procedures, experiences and research. In addition, the congress was a space for presentations on pathologies and treatments. Between the stone walls of the auditorium, TAVI – transcatheter aortic valve replacements -, percutaneous implants of mitral valves, the local administration of fibrinolytics to treat pulmonary embolism, the process to aspirate a clot in the pulmonary artery or circulatory assistance devices, such as ECMO.
| “I have been doing Hemodynamics for more than 30 years and what we did then is nothing like what we do now,” Bosa noted. |
A series of technologies and techniques that show the progress of Interventional Cardiology in the last decades. “I have been doing Hemodynamics for more than 30 years and what we did then and what we do today seems like absolutely nothing. Neither the procedures, nor the material, not even the pathologies that we now address and were not even touched upon before; it is impressive” , stated the head of the Interventional Cardiology Service at the Canary Islands University Hospital (Tenerife), Francisco Bosa.
Advances in the Canary Islands
“Interventional Cardiology has great development in the Canary Islands,” highlighted Bosa. In the area he directs perform operations on the aortic and mitral valves -edge-to-edge therapy- and are waiting to extend their interventions to the tricuspid. “Only in the aortic, we can place 100 implants a year,” he pointed out. In addition, his department has the capacity to carry out intracoronary lithotripsy, a method that uses ultrasound to break up severe calcifications and facilitate future implants. “We carry out the procedures with an increasingly higher level of safety,” he added.
The situation It is different on other islands. In Lanzarote, the Interventional Cardiology Service started on October 15, 2023 – operating from a multipurpose room at the Doctor José Molina Orosa University Hospital – and is in the training process. “We have little by little acquired the technological park necessary to perform cardiac catheterizations and interventional procedures to deal with urgency and emergencies, such as the heart attack code, for example,” said Vásquez, who hopes that the area he heads will maintain the level of its previous reference center, the Doctor Negrín University Hospital of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, to whose cardiac intervention unit they referred patients in need of heart implants.
Patient profile
The reinforcement of units focused on cardiac surgical procedures in the Canary Islands is linked to the general increase in the number of patients. Increased life expectancy means that people have more time to get sick, so individuals who care for They tend to be older and have some additional pathology. “We generally have people between 80 and 100 years old, many of them with previous kidney or heart problems,” explained Bosa.
On the other hand, a significant percentage comes from outside the archipelago. The autonomous community is a common destination for elderly people who leave their countries to avoid the cold winters of their places of origin. Their longevity, together with the presence of pathologies, means that many require health care. “We see this peculiarity, especially in cardiology, on a daily basis, especially from October to May, where almost a third of the patients admitted come from abroad. The majority are men of British and Nordic origin,” Vásquez stated. .
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