Piggyback Heart Transplant

[3113]

Did anyone else hear about this? Pretty remarkable!

In an unprecedented procedure reported online Monday in the medical journal Lancet, a donor heart was removed from a British girl, Hannah Clark, 10 years after it was grafted in a piggyback heart transplant. The procedure, known as a heterotopic heart transplant, was performed by Dr. Magdi Yacoub of Imperial College London and Harefield Hospital and involved grafting the donor heart, obtained from a five month-old baby, parallel to Hannah's own heart.

Hannah was 2 years old in 1995, when the transplant was performed, and suffered from dilated cardiomyopathy, a condition in which the heart becomes weakened and enlarged and cannot pump blood efficiently, eventually affecting the lungs, liver, and other body systems. As the prognosis for this condition tends to be quite poor, a transplant was recommended to save Hannah's life. Though the new heart functioned efficiently and Hannah was able to lead a normal childhood, she began to experience problems related to the large doses of immunosuppressive drugs needed to prevent her new heart from being rejected. Hannah eventually developed a virus-related cancer...

By 2006, Hannah was experiencing difficulty breathing and was near kidney failure, as her donor heart could not function without the high doses of immunosuppressive drugs. Finally, Dr. Yacoub and Dr. Victor Tsang of the Great Ormond Street Hospital in London decided to remove the donor heart in order to stop the drugs altogether. Following the surgery, doctors found that Hannah's heart had miraculously healed itself. Though they cannot explain how the regeneration happened, some researchers speculate that a small number of stem cells in the heart may have somehow been triggered in the crisis situation to heal the damaged tissue. If a treatment could be developed one day from this phenomenon many cardiac patients could be benefit.

Full Story Here.

 

[rgraham666]

Whoa!

 

[voluptuary_manque]

I wonder how many other children such a procedure might benefit. It certainly looks far more promising than attempting to manufacture a mechanical one.

 

[sadangel]

That is amazing!!

 

[TE999]

Regeneration: It's not just for crustaceans any more.

That is quite remarkable.