Jon Woods

Open-chest surgery “didn’t sound appealing” to Jon Woods, 65, who lives near Carthage, so he waited more than a year until the heart procedure he needed could be done in a less invasive way.

Last fall at FirstHealth Moore Regional Hospital, cardiothoracic surgeon Andy Kiser, M.D., began performing the minimally invasive version of the procedure he developed to correct the erratic beating of the heart known as atrial fibrillation. On Dec. 3, 2007, Woods became only the sixth patient at Moore Regional – and the sixth in the United States – to undergo the new procedure.

“Within two weeks, the difference in the way I felt was like night and day,” he says.

Atrial fibrillation (a-fib), which affects an estimated five million people, is the most common type of heart rhythm disturbance. It is the rapid, uncoordinated beating of the atria, the two upper chambers of the heart. The atria quiver instead of beating in rhythm when the electrical impulses that cause them to contract travel through the heart in chaotic fashion.

Some people with a-fib are severely debilitated by weakness, shortness of breath or pain. Others have no symptoms at all.

“It never hurt, but I would get tired and short of breath,” Woods says. “It just wears you out.”

Various methods have been developed to block stray electrical impulses and guide electricity onto the correct pathways through the heart. Traditional treatments for atrial fibrillation include medication, pacemaker implantation and electrical shock, all of which are offered at Moore Regional Hospital.

For many years, the “gold standard” for a-fib treatment has been a surgical procedure called the Cox Maze, which requires opening the chest, stopping the heart, cutting it into sections and sewing it back together. In collaboration with other surgeons, Dr. Kiser has developed a new version of the Cox Maze. Called the Ex-Maze, the procedure creates a more extensive pattern of scar tissue and controls the heart’s electrical impulses more effectively.

A major advantage of the Ex-Maze is that the procedure is done while the heart is beating, so the patient doesn’t have to be on a heart-lung machine. Because the heart is beating, the surgeon can also be sure that the heart has converted from a-fib to normal rhythm.

“We are finding that if we can convert patients out of atrial fibrillation in the operating room, we have a remarkable success rate,” Dr. Kiser says.

Initially, Dr. Kiser performed the Ex-Maze only on patients who were having some other type of open-chest procedure such as a coronary artery bypass. Then, last June, he was invited to Krakow, Poland, where he performed the world’s first minimally invasive Ex-Maze procedure.

A few months later, he began offering it as a treatment option at Moore Regional.  Jon Woods had been waiting, and taking medication to control his a-fib, for just such a development.

“It was well worth the wait, because the difference was dramatic,” he says. “I had just about forgotten what it feels like to have this much energy and to feel this good.”

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