Man Survives after Heart Shifted from Left to Right of his Chest in an Accident

A motorcycle accident in Italy has caused a 48-year-old man's heart shift from left side of his chest to right side. Though the injury was traumatic, the man survived.

The doctors, who treated the man while trying to listen to his heart beats, discovered that his heart shifted from its original place. CT scan and X-ray report of the man's chest showed that his heart had rotated 90 degrees to the right of the chest, according to doctors' report, published on 7 May 2014 in the New England Journal of Medicine journal.

"This is a very interesting anatomical finding, and it's very unusual," Live Sciences quoted Gregory Fontana, chairman of the department of cardiothoracic surgery at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York City, who wasn't involved in the case.

"I had never seen anything like it. What's unique about this case is the way the heart rotated so far in the other direction, and the patient was still awake and alert," Fontana told Live Science." said Fontana, who was surprised the man survived from such extreme trauma.

The doctors found that the damage to the man's lungs had caused air to escape from the lungs and made a space in the chest and most likely the air pushed the heart towards right, according to the report.

The doctors drained the air, which rotated the man's heart towards left and returned to its original position, according to the report.

The man also suffered a ruptured spleen and broken ribs. The rotation hampered the blood vessels, causing a fall in his blood pressure, though the heart itself wasn't injured.

"The structures in the back of the heart, and the big arteries, are fixed to the spine and to the tissue, but the heart kind of floats around in the sac around it. It's an amazing thing about medicine - that there are so many things we haven't seen yet, and will see in the future with great fascination," Fontana said.

(Ed:AJ)