Seven-year-old Elliot Atkins was the first child in the UK to have an angioplasty, which involves using a balloon to widen blood vessels near the heart
A little boy’s life has been saved after he became the first child in the UK to have a rare heart procedure.
Elliot Atkins’ parents were left heartbroken when medics said their boy was unlikely to survive heart failure and another serious condition. But specialists at London’s Great Ormond Street Hospital decided to give him an angioplasty – a special procedure to widen the blood vessels – which made him strong enough to have a vital op.
Now nearly a year on, Elliot, seven, is loving life and busy training for his school sports day. Mum Amy Govier, 29, said: “[He is] running around with his friends and happy. He is very excited for sports day – he’s just a bundle of joy, he always tries to make people laugh.”
Amy and her partner, Thomas Atkins, 29, first realised something wasn’t right when Elliot was 11 months old. After becoming poorly with a chest infection, the tot began struggling to breathe and a scan showed his heart was enlarged. Further tests revealed he was in heart failure, his blood pressure was dangerously high and the aorta – the large tube that connects the heart to the rest of the body – was narrowed.
He was later referred to Great Ormond Street, where he was diagnosed with middle aortic syndrome, which causes the body’s main blood vessel and vessels bringing blood to kidneys to narrow. It was at this point medics suggested trying an angioplasty.
Thomas, a military medic, said the anxiety of Elliot being the first child in the UK to have the rare procedure left them feeling “at a loss”. He added: “We couldn’t Google anything to reassure ourselves that this was going to be okay. There was stuff on angioplasty, sure, but the patient pool was much, much older.”
Elliot went on to have six angioplasty procedures, which made him strong enough to withstand an aortic bypass graft with a transplant of a single kidney. The complex surgery created a new route for blood flow around the narrowed section of his aorta artery – which extends down the chest and abdomen – to improve blood supply and blood pressure.
Elliot, who lives with his parents and sister Miya in Colchester, Essex, had the operation last July and continues to go from strength to strength. Amy said: “He’s running around happy [and] can keep up with his friends. He just knows he’s got this scar on his tummy, and that’s it.”
Since Elliot’s first angioplasty in 2020, the teams at Great Ormond Street have gone on to perform the procedure on other kids with heart failure. Dr Jelena Stojanovic, Elliot’s clinician and lead for the kidney transplant and renovascular service, said: “This is a very rare condition, and the numbers on its own will be small, but what is important is that the children can be offered the chance to survive.
When we as a team look at him today, we see a child who has been given an opportunity that simply would have not existed without the treatment and the extraordinary efforts of the teams involved in his care.”
