A teenage girl has become the first person in the UK to have a dissolvable implant fitted to close a hole in her heart that is around the size of a 10p piece.<\/p>\n
Lillie Yale, from Warrington, faced having a permanent metal device, which would have hindered her dream of becoming a professional rugby player.<\/p>\n
However, the biodegradable implant will act as a scaffold for Lillie’s heart to heal itself over the coming months and years, before fully dissolving and leaving behind no trace.<\/p>\n
The procedure was performed on the 14-year-old by surgeons at Alder Hey Children’s NHS Foundation Trust in Liverpool in June.<\/p>\n
It is the first time the device, known as Memosorb, has been used on a patient with an atrial septal defect (ASD) – a hole in the wall that divides the heart’s two upper chambers. It is made of a material commonly used in dissolvable stitches.<\/p>\n
Lillie’s mother Becci Nichols, 38, said her daughter is “healing perfectly” and has since run a 5k, visited a theme park and returned to playing rugby.<\/p>\n
Dr Salim Jivanji, consultant paediatric cardiologist, said the device looks “very similar” to a normal one already on the market.<\/p>\n
He added that, with a traditional metal device, tissue would start lining the implant, while this device acts as a “scaffold”.<\/p>\n
“The body reacts to the structure of the device,” Jivanji said.<\/p>\n
He added: “It slowly covers it with the lining of the heart, and the polymer starts getting dissolved into carbon dioxide and water within the tissue and slowly disappears completely.<\/p>\n
“Anywhere between six and 24 months the only thing you’ll see is what looks like a normal septum with no hole in it.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A teenage girl has become the first person in the UK to have a dissolvable implant fitted to…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":752286,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[59,57,58,50,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-752285","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-united-kingdom","tag-gb","tag-great-britain","tag-greatbritain","tag-news","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/752285","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=752285"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/752285\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/752286"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=752285"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=752285"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=752285"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}