HEART INSTITUTE
EARLY WARNING
HOW A NEW LAW HELPED DOCTORS CATCH
SARA HUNZIKER’S HEART DEFECT
Meet Sara
“Sara had an interrupted aortic arch type-B with a VSD and a hypoplastic aortic valve.” Nonnie
Hunziker, Sara’s mom, effortlessly rattles off the scientific terms while pinching a speck of fuzz
off the plump 5-month-old’s face. “Didn’t you? Didn’t you? Oh, look, you got lint on your chins.”
Nonnie delivered Sara after a
“perfectly normal” pregnancy, near
her home in northeastern Colorado.
Sara seemed in excellent health until
24 hours old, when standard pulse
oximetry screening returned some
worrisome results.
“We’ve found that if you measure
the oxygen levels of babies about
24 hours after they’re born, it picks
up kids who might have congenital
heart disease,” says Children’s
Hospital Colorado’s Christopher
Rausch, M.D. “If they go home not
knowing they have a heart problem,
they can get very sick, very quickly.”
Studies had shown the efficacy of
pulse-ox screening as early as 2007,
but the thinner air of high elevation
affects blood oxygen.
Dr. Rausch’s team
wondered if the test
would work as well at
Children’s Colorado, a
mile above sea level.
“We did a study at University of
Colorado Hospital [which shares a
campus with Children’s Colorado]
and at Memorial Hospital in
Colorado Springs, which sits at
about 6,500 feet, and proved
that, yes, it could work,” says Dr.
Rausch. “Once we proved that, we
partnered with the American Heart
Association to pass legislation
saying that every baby born in
Colorado below 7,000 feet should
get a pulse-ox test.” The law passed
in May of 2015.
So when Sara was born in July,
she received the test as a matter
of course. “She failed,” says
Nonnie. “She failed again at 25
and 26 hours, so they took an
echocardiogram and sent it to
Children’s Colorado. They sent an
ambulance right away. There were
like eight doctors waiting for us.”
“I still didn’t really understand
what was going on,” recalls Adam
Hunziker, Sara’s dad. “Nonnie was
exhausted, she fell asleep. Then the
doctor comes in and says, ‘As soon
as your wife is awake, I’ll explain.’
I’m just sitting there hoping she’s
going to wake up soon.”
Sara was born with her left
ventricular outflow tract obstructed,
preventing her heart from pumping
oxygenated blood to the rest of
her body, as well as an obstruction
of the main artery coming out
of her heart. James Jaggers,
M.D., performed the operation —
known as the “Yasui” procedure
— necessary to restore blood flow
through Sara’s heart to her body.
The operation was a success and
Sara is thriving. She can roll over
and Nonnie thinks she’ll be sitting
up soon. Her 2-year-old brother Levi
is teaching her how to high-five and
play tag. (“He’s not very good at it,”
Nonnie quips. “He just tags her and
runs away.”)
And while any heart operation on
an infant requires quite a bit of
follow-up care, Sara’s last check-up
at Children’s Colorado went well —
it’ll be another month before she
has to go back. In the meantime,
Nonnie’s confident she can handle
what comes next. “We’ve learned
more about the heart than we ever
wanted to know,” she says.
We partnered with
the American Heart
Association to pass
legislation saying that
every baby born in
Colorado below 7,000
feet should get a
pulse-ox test.
Sara Hunziker unwittingly taught her parents a whole lot about the heart.
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