DESTINY trial to investigate how to improve protection for children during open heart surgery
Mending hearts at our Children’s Hospital - DESTINY trial to investigate how to improve protection for children during open-heart surgery
Starting this month, our Paediatric Intensive Care Research team will be recruiting for a new British Heart Foundation-funded £570,000 clinical study, led by Cardiac Surgery at our Children’s Hospital with Birmingham Clinical Trials Unit at the University of Birmingham.
The trial aims to make life-saving open-heart operations safer for children, by comparing two different ways to protect the heart during cardiac surgery and determining which is most effective. Over the next 18 months, we aim to recruit 50-70 children between the ages of 0-16 years old out of the target of 220 across the four UK sites.
Children undergoing surgery for congenital heart disease will be recruited to compare if del Nido cardioplegia, the most commonly used solution in the United States, is better than St Thomas’ blood cardioplegia, the standard of care in the UK. The choice of cardioplegia does not change the operation but may make the surgery faster by reducing the interruptions of having to administer multiple doses.
We spoke with Mr Nigel Drury, the Chief Investigator for the DESTINY trial from our Children’s Hospital about the trial and how it has the potential to be ground-breaking, enhancing surgical practices to improve the safety of children who undergo life-changing open-heart operations.
Nigel explains: “Cardioplegia is a type of solution we inject into the heart through the coronary arteries, causing the heart to temporarily stop beating. This allows us to protect the heart whilst performing open-heart surgery and safely repair defects inside the heart.”
“By improving the way in which we protect the heart during surgery, we expect that children will recover from surgery faster and with fewer complications. These early benefits may also lead to better long-term outcomes, with less injury and scarring to the heart muscle. As children with severe heart defects often need multiple operations, they will have the most to gain from improving how we protect the heart during each surgery.
“If our trial is successful, this will support the need for a larger, definitive study, which could have the potential to change the way children are treated around the world.”
We’d like to say thank you to Nigel for speaking with us about the new trial and also a special thanks to the cardiac surgery team, surgeons Tim Jones, Natasha Khan and Phil Botha, lead clinical perfusionist Indie Bilkhoo, and lead research nurse for the trial, Carly Tooke from the PICU Research Nursing team.