Jan Quaegebeur, PresidentJan Quaegebeur, M.D., was elected President of SoH during the Board meeting of June 8, 2007 in New York.
Dr. Jan Quaegebeur is of the generation that helped create modern pediatric cardiac surgery. He was born in Belgium and trained in the Netherlands, Boston, and Houston. From the start, he had good hands.
Currently a Professor of Surgery at the Columbia University College of Physicians & Surgeons, the Attending Cardiac Surgeon at the Columbia University Medical Center, and the Director of Pediatric Cardiac Surgery at the New York-Presbyterian Hospital’s Congenital Heart Center, Quaegebeur’s reputation has blossomed as one of the top pediatric cardiac surgeons in the nation. He is well-known in the medical world for having developed the arterial switch, a procedure performed on newborns so that they may undergo open-heart surgery.
Before Quaegebeur got involved in the field, heart surgeons hesitated to operate on very young kids. Newborns, it was thought, were too fragile to undergo open-heart surgery.
But for Quaegebeur, the imperative to operate early crystallized in the mid-seventies with a specific defect. In some instances, the arteries that should go to a child’s lungs connected instead to his aorta, the big vessel that feeds blood to the body. Basically, the kid’s system was backward. 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 Quaegebeur pressed on, studying some 7,500 hearts. By the early eighties, Quaegebeur had brought down the mortality rate of the procedure dramatically — to close to 5 percent (today, it’s closer to 2 percent). He does 60 percent of his operations in the first three months of life, and the arterial switch is his signature operation.