Innovative Procedure Offered For Uncontrollable Portal Hypertension
September 12, 2005
Interventional radiologists at Children’s recently introduced a new treatment for children with severe, uncontrollable portal hypertension.
TIPS — or Transjugular Intrahepatic Portosystemic Shunt — is a minimally invasive procedure that can be performed in children who are too ill to withstand the abdominal surgery usually used to treat uncontrollable portal hypertension.
Dr. Manrita Sidhu, a pediatric interventional radiologist at Children’s, and Dr. Thomas Burdick, director of interventional radiology at Harborview, performed the first TIPS procedure at Children’s this past May.
Though widely performed in adults since the 1980s, TIPS has not often been used in the pediatric population. Because it is less invasive than surgery, the recovery time is shorter. However, surgical shunts tend to stay open longer in children, so TIPS is reserved for those children who are too ill for an abdominal surgical procedure.
Children’s Interventional Radiology (IR) Department is growing rapidly, and performs the entire range of minimally invasive image guided procedures including:
- Vascular access
- Gastrostomy and cecostomy tubes
- Radio frequency ablation of osteoid osteomas and other lesions
- Angiography including cerebral
- Angioplasty, stent placement and embolization
- Joint injections
- Nephrostomy tubes and ureteral stents
- Biopsies and drainages
- Treatment of vascular malformations
For further information about the TIPS procedure or other interventional radiology procedures, call the Radiology department at (206) 987-2132.