Woman operated upon for rare brain condition

Forty-two-year-old Omwati's family thought she had had a heart attack and were getting her treated for the same.

Forty-two-year-old Omwati's family thought she had had a heart attack and were getting her treated for the same. However, her doctors weren't able to pinpoint the exact cause of her ailment.

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The Ballabgarh resident was brought to Indraprastha Apollo Hospitals in December last year when her condition didn't improve. Here she was diagnosed with Tako Tsubo syndrome — a rare condition in which a person suffers from brain hemorrhage-induced heart attack, because of which accurate diagnosis becomes difficult, resulting mostly in death.

"She was brought to us in a critical state. Her heart was functioning at only about 20% of its capacity, her blood pressure was very low, she was drowsy and vomiting. In the local hospital at Faridabad, she had been treated for heart attack," said Dr Pranav Kumar, senior consultant neurosurgery at Indraprastha Apollo Hospitals, who led the surgical team.

"We got the CT scan done of her brain and, as we had suspected, it showed blood scattered all over her brain. The heart had only suffered a secondary impact due to injury to the brain," he added. Her surgery took six-hours and within a week her heart function started to show improvement.