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Are you interested in making an appointment for your child with connective tissue disorder? Contact our team today.
Stanford Medicine Children’s Health's Connective Tissue Disorders Program is one of the few multidisciplinary, comprehensive centers in the world that treats highly complex connective tissue disorders and related conditions in children. We often can help parents who have been told that their child’s needs are too complex, giving them hope that their child’s chance of survival can improve.
We can treat the full spectrum of your child’s unique genetic expression of connective tissue disorder. No two children are exactly alike. For example, with Williams syndrome, only about one-third of children will need a surgery to repair their heart or arteries. Whatever your child’s needs are, we provide well-rounded care to improve health and save lives. Because our knowledge goes well beyond general pediatric cardiology, we are able to identify and treat unique manifestations of connective tissue disorders. Due to the volume of children with connective tissue disorders that we see, our expert team often makes new discoveries that help advance care and treatments.
We treat the following connective tissue disorders:
Connective tissue disorders often require a genetic test for diagnosis, as all involve a missing gene or part of a gene or genes that play a vital role in creating connective tissue within the body. We diagnose not only connective tissue disorders but also other disorders or conditions that mimic them.
Treatment options for cardiovascular needs range from medication and heart catheterization to more complex therapies like heart surgery, including pulmonary artery reconstruction and heart transplant. Once your child receives care at Stanford Medicine Children’s Health, we are committed to partnering with you and your hometown cardiologist as your child grows.
Our skilled pediatric heart surgeons perform more surgeries than are done at many of our peer hospitals (700+ annually) and are sometimes the only specialists in the world who can perform a complex heart surgery, even when you have been told it is not possible elsewhere. For example, some connective tissue disorders affect the pulmonary arteries that connect the heart to the lungs, requiring pulmonary artery reconstruction.
Our Pulmonary Artery Reconstruction (PAR) program is the top program in the world for pulmonary artery reconstruction, famous for a novel, highly complex surgical technique called unifocalization, developed and pioneered by our Heart Center director, Frank L. Hanley, MD. Pediatric patients from all over the nation and world travel to Stanford Medicine Children’s Health to receive this lifesaving surgery from Dr. Hanley. Unifocalization strengthens and replaces pulmonary arteries, even deep in the lungs.
We also work closely with the Pediatric Advanced Cardiac Therapies (PACT) team to treat children with heart failure, including those who need a ventricular assist device (VAD) to sustain them as they await heart transplantation. Our pediatric heart transplant numbers are the highest in California, and our long-term results for complicated heart transplants are outstanding, better than the national average.
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