2023-05-04 07:16:23
American surgeons have pulled off a technical feat by transplanting a beating heart from a deceased donor into a living patient.
Every year, organ donation allows thousands of patients to receive a new liver, a new kidney… If they are necessary to save the lives of these patients, the heart remains the most difficult organ to transplant. Indeed, its operation is more delicate than that of other grafts.
Regardless of the cause of death of the donor patient, it is still necessary to keep the heart beating to perform the transplant. For this, health personnel can use two techniques. The first is to keep the heart working in the body of a brain dead patient until the operation.
But for the first time in history, surgeons have succeeded in this operation using another method. For this transplant, health professionals have used the organ of a donor victim of cardiac death. The operation did the subject of a comprehensive study published in the Journal of Thoracic and Cardiovascular Surgery Techniques.
How is such a tour de force possible?
In this particular case, surgeons and medical teams use what is called a heart-lung machine. This “reproduces” the functioning of the human body and allows artificially keep the heart beating while waiting for the transplant. However, this technique remains very risky.
This is because the donor’s heart is stopped twice during the process. The first occurs when the patient dies. While the second occurs when the beating heart passes from one body to another. In fact, the chances of a successful transplant are lower than those of a heart from a brain-dead patient.
To increase the chances of success, the surgeons simply did not unplug the device keeping the organ functioning during the transplant. This makes the operation as well as the suturing more complex than with a classic graft. But that’s also what made this transplant unique and contributed to its success.
What are the benefits of beating heart transplantation for patients?
At present, it is still too early to define the advantages of this technique in order to generalize it. Since this is a first, feedback from several other similar transplants is needed to draw conclusions. However, surgeons and medical staff have already seen a positive post-operative effect.
The study reports that the patient who benefited from this world first recovered better that people who had a heart transplant temporarily stopped. It will therefore be necessary to wait for returns from future transplants to know if this finding applies to all heart transplant recipients.
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