Elliot Atkins is training for his school sports day, “a bundle of joy” who “always tries to make people laugh”. But less than a year ago, the seven-year-old from Colchester was fighting for his life after doctors warned his parents he was unlikely to survive heart failure.
Specialists at London’s Great Ormond Street Hospital offered Elliot a chance – an angioplasty, a procedure that uses a balloon to widen blood vessels near the heart. It had never been performed on a child in the UK before. His father, Thomas Atkins, 29, a military medic, recalled the anxiety of being unable to find reassurance online. “We couldn’t Google anything to reassure ourselves that this was going to be okay,” he said. “There was stuff on angioplasty, sure, but the patient pool was much, much older.”
“Seven-year-old Elliot Atkins became the first child in the UK to have a life-saving angioplasty for a rare heart condition.”
Elliot’s ordeal began when he was 11 months old. After a chest infection, he struggled to breathe. A scan revealed an enlarged heart, dangerously high blood pressure and a narrowed aorta – the main artery from the heart to the body. Further tests diagnosed middle aortic syndrome, a “one in a million” condition that narrows the body’s main blood vessel and those supplying the kidneys.
Over time, Elliot underwent six angioplasty procedures, each strengthening him for the next step. Last July, he had an aortic bypass graft combined with a single kidney transplant – complex surgery that created a new route for blood flow around the narrowed section of his aorta, improving blood supply and blood pressure.
Now, nearly a year on, Elliot is “running around with his friends and happy”, said his mother, Amy Govier, 29. “He’s very excited for sports day – he’s just a bundle of joy.” She added that Elliot only knows “he’s got this scar on his tummy, and that’s it”.
Since Elliot’s first angioplasty in 2020, the teams at Great Ormond Street have performed the procedure on other children, building on the success that saved his life.