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Cardiac Surgery
Jan M. Quaegebeur, MD
Jan M. Quaegebeur, MD
Director, Pediatric Cardiac Surgery
NewYork-Presbyterian Morgan Stanley Children's Hospital
Attending Surgeon
NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital/Columbia University Medical Center
Morris & Rose Milstein Professor of Surgery
Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons
Dr. Jan Quaegebeur is of the generation that helped to create modern pediatric cardiac surgery. He was born in Belgium and trained in the Netherlands, Boston, Birmingham (Alabama) and Houston.
Widely recognized as one of the nation's top pediatric cardiac surgeons, Dr. Quaegebeur is currently the Morris & Rose Milstein Professor of Surgery at Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons and Attending Cardiac Surgeon at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital/Columbia University Medical Center. He is well known in the medical world for having developed the arterial switch, a procedure performed on newborns with transposition of the great arteries.
Before Dr. Quaegebeur entered the field, heart surgeons hesitated to operate on newborns, believing they were too fragile to undergo open heart surgery. For Dr. Quaegebeur, the imperative to operate early crystallized in the mid-seventies with a specific defect where the arteries that should go to a child's lungs connected instead to the aorta, the big vessel that feeds blood to the body. The solution was obvious. You had to switch the arteries -- and you had to do it immediately.
The operation was considered extremely difficult, if not impossible. But Dr. Quaegebeur pressed on, studying some 7,500 hearts. By the early eighties, Dr. Quaegebeur had dramatically lowered the mortality rate of the procedure to approximately 5 percent. Today, mortality is about 2 percent.
The arterial switch is Dr. Quaegebeur's signature operation. Close to 60 percent of his operations are performed on children in the first three months of life.
