Ashley Lane gave birth in July of 2019 to twins 17 weeks before her due date.

Both boys had patent ductus arteriosus, or PDA, a congenital heart defect where a blood vessel that allows blood to bypass the lungs in the womb, fails to close after birth — along with other health concerns like lung damage.

“With being so premature,” Lane said. “There were so many what-ifs and question marks and things in the air of what would be wrong with them.”

The Metairie family waited three weeks for the holes in their children’s hearts to heal on their own.

They did not.

Then, the family met with Dr. Ivory Crittendon, a pediatric cardiologist and the co-chief of pediatric cardiology at Ochsner Medical Complex in New Orleans.

Crittendon wanted to try a new FDA-approved method and device, the Amplatzer Piccolo Occluder, to close the twins’ hearts using a catheter in the leg.

The Lane family said yes.

“That first day with Dr. Crittendon set the tone for our whole story. We definitely had such a sense of peace,” Lane said. “When your kids are born that young, and everything that you planned was totally out of your control, and you had to learn to let go very, very, very quickly and trust strangers with your most prized possession, it’s very vulnerable.”

One week later, the twins were taken into back-to-back procedures as among of the first patients in Louisiana to receive treatment.

The previous treatment for PDAs was to perform open-heart surgery, where the doctor would create an incision along the side of the body and crack the chest of the child.

“I think there’s been enough data through all the years to prove that open-heart surgery probably wasn’t the best form of PDA closures,” Crittendon said. “Because a lot of kids struggled for a number of reasons afterwards.”

PDAs are more common in premature babies than mature babies, according to Crittendon. The more mature a child is born, the more likely the hole in the blood vessel is to close on its own.

In this new procedure, Crittendon and his team at Ochsner insert a catheter into the leg of an infant as small as 700 grams (the twins were 770g and 817g at the time of the surgery). Then, through the catheter tube, the surgeon places a device that will facilitate tissue to grow around the hole in the heart.

“It starts the natural process of the PDA closing,” Crittendon said. “It basically augments that process and tissues, sort of envelops around the device and closes the PDA on both sides.”

According to the Crittendon, the most impactful part of the noninvasive procedure is that the recovery time is exponentially higher for the very small, vulnerable patients.

“We take out that hollow tube and take out that small IV and just leave a Band-Aid on the leg,” Crittendon said. “And there’s really no real recovery from the procedure, which is the best part.”

The Lane twins’ hearts have since grown over the devices, and, after five years of checkups, they have gotten their approval from Crittendon to wait another three years for their next visit with the doctors. They both graduated kindergarten in May.

According to Lane, the twins are doing every sport they can get their hands on — soccer just ended, and they are looking to pick up baseball this summer.

“We know that there are so many babies out there that are not as fortunate, and families that are not as fortunate to have this procedure,” Lane said. “This is their second time around playing all these sports. They are really getting the hang of it and enjoying their sporting activities and being competitive against each other as twins.”

Treating patients in the future

The team of physicians, nurses and anesthesiologists that performs the new Piccolo procedure is based at Ochsner Children’s Hospital in New Orleans.

While the team has made moves to travel between hospitals within New Orleans to perform the live-saving procedure, they have also transported patients from around the state and Mississippi for treatment.

“That’s something that we’ve been proud of that we’ve been able to do,” Crittendon said. “However, we’ve sort of led the nation on trying to bring the therapy to the babies, rather than transporting them.”

Going forward, the team hopes to expand their ability to perform the procedure to patients outside of New Orleans, to hospitals within the health system across the state.