Valley Baptist Medical Center Brownsville showed off more than $2.5 million in upgrades to its heart catherization lab on Tuesday, including a full renovation to imaging equipment and an expansion that will allow cardiac specialists to perform more specialized procedures to benefit patients.
The improvements include state-of-the-art electrophysiology equipment that will allow cardiologists to perform sophisticated procedures to improve their patients’ lives, said cardiologist Dr. Fadi Alfayoumi, medical director of the cardiac catheterization lab.
“With advancement of science and technology, the idea of being able to go in there with catheters, no cuts, no surgeries and find where these electrical problems are happening through a technique called mapping, and you can go there and zip it … so you can prevent a stroke from happening, you can prevent a heart attack from happening. We can make the heart muscle stronger, we can make the patient feel better,” Alfayoumi said.
Alfayoumi and Diego Andrade, an engineer from equipment provider Biosense Webster, demonstrated the new equipment. Andrade showed on a digital image of a patient’s heart the hundreds of points where electrical problems in the heartbeat can develop.
The cardiac catheterization lab at Valley Baptist Medical Center-Brownsville is a highly specialized unit in the hospital equipped with the latest technology where cardiologists work alongside specially trained nurses and staff to perform a wide variety of minimally invasive tests and advanced cardiac procedures to diagnose and treat cardiovascular disease.
Cardiologists in the lab utilize special imaging technology to examine arteries and visualize how well blood is flowing throughout a patient’s circulatory system, which provides a physician with vital information to help diagnose and fix potential blockages or determine the best course of treatment for every patient.
Alfayoumi said the cardiac catherization lab provides the tools cardiac specialists need in an area with high incidence of diabetes and related diseases.
But he said proper diet and exercise are the main defense against heart disease rather than treating it after it happens.
“Ninety-five percent of heart disease is preventable, and five percent is completely out of your hands: genetics, viral problems, medication that was prescribed to you by someone else, cancer treatments that have side effects on the heart,” he said.
“What causes heart problems is these factors: blood pressure, diabetes. cholesterol, sedentary lifestyle, alcohol consumption heavily, nicotine addiction, smoking, drugs and marijuana. If you follow the proper lifestyle modification, diet and exercise you’re most likely to prevent yourself from ever ending up in a place like this,” he said.
“You’re talking to a cardiologist. I exercise every day… If you want to be smart about it, lifestyle modification rather than treating it when it happens is the way to go,” he said.
Alfayoumi said the same teamwork that goes into successfully treating patients was vital to accomplishing the recent upgrades to the lab’s capabilities, and that the upgrades were built upon a solid foundation of a history of excellent cardiac care at Valley Baptist-Brownsville.
“We built the infrastructure for our cath lab with the mentality of, ‘Once we do it we do it right, it is going to last forever. That’s the mentality here. We were very patient and thorough when making the decisions to upgrade our cath lab,” he said. “There is a vision and there is group efforts to make these types of things happen. That’s why at Valley Baptist, we believe that when we make something happen, we believe they will last for a long time — and that’s why we believe we have the best team.”
