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Health News Archive 300 - Heart Surgery
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Cardiothoracic Surgeon Reports Zero Percent Mortality with Ribose

• Pioneering Beating Heart CABG MD Presents ATS Paper on Using Ribose to Rebuild the Energy Supply of the Heart Prior to Bypass Surgery

Even though he has performed the highest percentage of Beating Heart Coronary Artery Bypass Grafting (also called Off Pump CABG) procedures of any doctor in the U.S. since 1990, Dr. David Perkowski was still looking for improvement. Treating his patients with D-Ribose (CORvalen™) before surgery proved to be just what the doctor ordered, as a paper being presented to the American Thoracic Society International Conference in San Diego May 2006 will show. "We did a controlled study with two groups of our off-pump patients with one group using ribose and one not using ribose," explains Dr. Perkowski, Chief of Cardiothoracic Surgery at Saddleback Memorial in Laguna Hills, California. "In the ribose group we saw a post-operative improvement in cardiac index that was 55-percent higher than the non-treated group (36% vs. 23.2% respectively), which is quite astounding. An improved cardiac index means the heart is able to pump more blood to the body with each heartbeat. With the ribose supplementation the heart can recruit energy more effectively helping it to simply pump better. So now we are using the ribose in most of our patients. This data is very important in real-world cardiac surgery, and it's exciting!"

While Dr. Perkowski's report to the American Thoracic Society involves data from 68 ribose-treated patients, he has now collected data from over 100 patients, with similarly favorable results. Health care providers, insurance companies, and many cardiac patients themselves certainly favor the use of the heart-lung machine for a bypass procedure. Dr. Perkowski's results show this procedure can now be utilized in more patients when ribose is used in their treatment regimen. While the heart-lung machine is acknowledged as one of cardiac surgery's most important inventions, there are risks associated with stopping the heart and temporarily replacing its functions with a machine. Those risks include bleeding, major stroke and neurological problems.

Additionally, complete recovery for a traditional bypass surgery ranges from four to six weeks, while recovery for beating heart bypass procedures have been reported to be as short as three to four weeks. In many cases, the patient is out of the hospital within just a few days following surgery. Ribose supplementation has also allowed Dr. Perkowski and his team to get critical cases to the operating table sooner. "Typically as a cardiac surgeon we have to look at many parameters to ensure the safety of the operation. Without ribose, it would generally take seven to 10 days following a heart attack before we could do a beating heart bypass operation on a patient, even though their heart needed it sooner. With the ribose supplementation, now in many cases we can move that surgery up."

"Our patients are frequently elderly and have had coronary disease for a long time," continues Dr. Perkowski. "Sometimes their hearts can contract quite well, but they can't fully relax. And what the ribose use allows us to do is help the heart relax so it can fill with blood more effectively for the next heartbeat. With the administration of ribose, the entire ventricle works better, and recovers in a shorter period of time. Ribose allows the operation to proceed in a much easier fashion."

All this after just a few doses of a simple, five-carbon sugar that is found in every cell of the human body? If it is so simple, yet so effective, why doesn't the world know about it? "Understanding what ribose does in the heart takes a good understanding of biochemistry and what is happening with the body at the cellular level," states Dr. Perkowski. "In my specific case, to do beating heart surgery we really had to investigate and know what was going on within the cell when it was normal and when it was damaged. We found the most important step in all of these enzymatic systems is the production of adenosine triphosphate, or ATP. It's the energy currency of the cell and provides the power all cells need to function. So whatever can be done to aid or improve that process is going to be important for that cell, and ribose has been proven to significantly accelerate energy synthesis and recovery.

"It's hard to believe it can be so effective, so quickly, but we've got the data to prove it." There is one other number Dr. Perkowski hasn't yet discussed, and it's a significant one. "Our predicted mortality rate with the ribose patients was between four-and-a-half to five percent. Our actual mortality rate with the ribose patients is zero. We think that is extremely important, particularly given the fact the patients we see belong to the oldest and highest risk group."

So what does Dr. Perkowski see for the future of ribose supplementation? "Ribose today is a little bit like beating heart surgery was 10 or 15 years ago. Nobody thought back then we could do it, and now we can successfully operate on 98-percent of all first-time coronary bypass patients without having to use the heart-lung machine. I believe we will have a similar success story with ribose, although I hope it doesn't take that long for it to be put to wider use."

Source: American Thoracic Society International Conference in San Diego May 19 - 24, 2006.

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