Blalock–Hanlon procedure

Content sourced from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.

The Blalock–Hanlon procedure was created in the 1950s by Alfred Blalock and C. Rollins Hanlon. It is an atrial septectomy, meaning the surgeons intentionally create a hole in the wall between the heart’s atria to mix oxygen-rich and oxygen-poor blood and change how blood flows. The idea was tested in dogs before it was tried in humans. The procedure was mainly done in very young children, often infants from one day old to about five months old, to help with transposition of the great vessels. In early reports, 10 of 48 children died, and deaths tended to occur in infants under one month old due to the seriousness of the surgery. The overall mortality was about 21%, so the procedure is not used today because of its high risk. It involves two connecting circulations—the pulmonary and systemic—and the mixing of blood can cause problems such as irregular heartbeats, cerebral blood clots, adhesions around the heart, and death in some babies after the septectomy. Some children needed only one operation, while others did not require a second operation.