Stent Rescue Reopens Blocked Heart Bypass Graft in Child With Kawasaki Disease

When a twelve-year-old boy walked into Children’s Hospital of Fudan University in Shanghai, his coronary arteries told a story of damage that had begun years earlier. He carried the legacy of Kawasaki disease, an inflammatory illness of childhood that, in severe cases, transforms the heart’s own blood supply into a fragile network of bulging aneurysms and life-threatening blockages. Surgeons had already performed multi-vessel coronary artery bypass grafting to reroute blood around his occluded arteries. But one year after the operation, imaging revealed a new threat: the graft supplying his right coronary artery had narrowed dangerously at the surgical junction. In a case now reported in BMC Pediatrics, a team of pediatric cardiologists and cardiac surgeons rescued that failing graft with a stent, offering a rare and instructive example of how interventional cardiology can salvage a bypass operation in a child.

Kawasaki disease is the leading cause of acquired heart disease in children in many parts of the world. The condition, whose exact trigger remains uncertain, produces widespread inflammation of blood vessels, and the coronary arteries are its most vulnerable targets. In a subset of patients, the vessel walls weaken so profoundly that giant coronary artery aneurysms form, measuring far beyond normal arterial dimensions. These aneurysms are not merely cosmetic distortions. Blood stagnates inside them, clots form, and over time the inflamed vessel walls can scar and narrow until the artery closes completely. The result is a cruel paradox: segments of artery that are abnormally wide in one place may be critically obstructed in another, starving the heart muscle of oxygen and setting the stage for myocardial infarction even in childhood.

For this patient, the disease had run an aggressive course. Echocardiography and coronary computed tomography angiography documented giant aneurysms involving both the left and right coronary systems, with occlusive lesions that compromised flow to the heart muscle. Medical therapy alone could not restore perfusion, so the surgical team turned to coronary artery bypass grafting, the standard revascularization strategy for severe Kawasaki-related coronary disease. Surgeons used arterial grafts, including the internal mammary arteries, to create new channels from the aorta to the coronary arteries beyond the blockages. Bypass surgery in children with Kawasaki disease is technically demanding: the target vessels are small, the aneurysmal walls are diseased, and the patient will need these grafts to function for decades. The initial operation succeeded, and the boy recovered with his heart muscle once again receiving blood through the reconstructed pathways.

The danger, however, had not passed. Roughly a year after surgery, surveillance revealed stenosis at the anastomosis, the delicate hand-sewn junction where the right internal mammary artery graft had been connected to the right coronary artery. Anastomotic stenosis is a recognized complication of bypass grafting, arising from scar tissue formation, intimal thickening, or technical factors at the connection site. In adults, such narrowing is often addressed with repeat surgery or percutaneous coronary intervention, the catheter-based family of techniques that includes balloon angioplasty and stent placement. In children, the evidence base is thin. Pediatric coronary arteries are small, the graft anatomy is complex, and the long-term behavior of coronary stents in growing bodies remains incompletely understood. Reports on managing post-CABG anastomotic stenosis in children are so limited that each documented case carries outsized educational value.

The Shanghai team elected to attempt percutaneous salvage. Under angiographic guidance, clinicians advanced a catheter to the narrowed segment, confirmed the severity and extent of the stenosis, and deployed a stent to scaffold the vessel open. Intravascular ultrasound, an imaging tool that provides a cross-sectional view from inside the artery, supports such procedures by characterizing the lesion and verifying that the stent is fully expanded and well apposed to the vessel wall. The procedure restored flow through the right internal mammary artery graft, re-establishing perfusion to the territory it was built to protect. For a patient whose native coronary arteries were already devastated, preserving the patency of even one graft can make the difference between a functioning heart and progressive ischemic damage.

The technical logic of the intervention rewards close attention. A bypass graft is only as good as its weakest point, and the anastomosis is inherently the most vulnerable: it is a junction between two vessels of different calibers and compliance, joined by suture in tissue that is actively remodeling. When scar narrows that junction, the entire graft is throttled regardless of how healthy its length may be. A stent acts as an internal splint, mechanically resisting the inward recoil of scarred tissue. In this case, the stent was positioned to hold open the outflow of the arterial graft into the right coronary artery, converting a failing surgical connection into a widely patent conduit. Follow-up imaging confirmed the result, and myocardial perfusion imaging performed six months after the procedure showed only mild reversible ischemia at the apex and apical inferior wall, with tracer uptake replenishing at rest, an encouraging functional signature of restored blood supply.

Beyond the procedural success, the case underscores a principle that pediatric cardiologists emphasize repeatedly: Kawasaki disease is not an acute illness that ends when the fever resolves. Children with giant coronary aneurysms require lifelong surveillance, because complications can emerge years or decades after the initial inflammation. Aneurysms can thrombose, calcify, and stenose silently. Bypass grafts, which behave in children much as they do in adults but must endure far longer, can fail gradually or suddenly. The stenosis in this patient appeared a full year after CABG, a delay that illustrates why serial echocardiography, coronary imaging, and functional assessment such as stress myocardial perfusion imaging are indispensable in this population. A single reassuring scan is never a discharge from care.

The report also highlights the multidisciplinary nature of modern management for these patients. Caring for a child with Kawasaki-related giant aneurysms draws on pediatric rheumatology for control of inflammation, noninvasive cardiology for imaging and functional assessment, cardiac surgery for revascularization, and interventional cardiology for catheter-based rescue. Each decision, from the choice of antithrombotic therapy to the selection of graft targets to the timing of intervention on a stenotic anastomosis, must be individualized to anatomy that is often unlike anything seen in adult practice. The authors frame their experience as a guide to such individualized management, noting that percutaneous coronary intervention can be an effective therapeutic option in selected pediatric cases, even in the challenging setting of a post-surgical graft complication.

For the broader clinical community, the message is twofold. First, stent implantation deserves consideration as a salvage strategy when a bypass graft fails in a child, provided the anatomy is suitable and an experienced interventional team is available; repeat sternotomy in a patient with diseased, aneurysmal coronaries carries substantial risk, and a catheter-based solution may offer a safer path to restored perfusion. Second, the case is a reminder that the frontier of pediatric cardiology increasingly involves adults-in-the-making: children who survived acute Kawasaki disease in the era of modern diagnosis now live for decades with coronary anatomy that demands the full toolkit of cardiovascular medicine. As the surviving cohort grows, so too will the need for evidence on how best to monitor, maintain, and when necessary rescue the surgical and catheter-based repairs that keep their hearts supplied with blood. This single patient’s successful stent rescue adds a concrete data point to a sparse literature, and it offers reassurance that when a child’s bypass graft begins to fail, the interventional catheter lab may hold the answer.

Subject of Research: Stent implantation to treat anastomotic stenosis of a coronary bypass graft after CABG in a child with Kawasaki disease

Article Title: Salvage stent implantation for anastomotic stenosis after coronary artery bypass grafting in Kawasaki disease: a case report

Article References: Zheng, Y., Zhao, L., Dai, G., Chu, C., Zhao, Q., Wang, F., Lin, Y., He, L., & Liu, F. (2026). Salvage stent implantation for anastomotic stenosis after coronary artery bypass grafting in Kawasaki disease: a case report. BMC Pediatrics. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12887-026-07668-8

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s12887-026-07668-8

Keywords: Kawasaki disease, coronary artery aneurysms, coronary artery bypass grafting, percutaneous coronary intervention, stent implantation, anastomotic stenosis, pediatric cardiology, internal mammary artery graft, myocardial perfusion imaging, revascularization, restenosis, children's heart disease