welcomes you to the new, improved website!The Heart and Lung Transplant team of St. Vincent’s hospital (Sydney, Australia) have successfully transplanted “dead” hearts into three patients. The donor hearts had stopped beating for 20 minutes, but were kept viable by being immersed in a preservation solution. The hearts were then restarted and kept beating in a specially developed circuit, called a “heart in a box.”
World’s first ‘dead’ heart transplant performed in Sydney
Submitted by: Joel Dunning
Source: The Guardian
Keywords:
Author(s): Haroon Siddique
2 Comments
It will open up a new avenue for heart transplantation in the places where brain death laws are unclear and or culturally poorly accepted.
The popular journal’s assertion of Kumud’s world first DCD/OCS OHT is queationnable: the technique has being used in at least one UK hospital for a while, as an innovation under investigation, has no FDA approval, and no evidence so far to suggest a paradigm shift in improving OHT outcomes. In fact, a previous editorial at the Lancet asserted that the OCS had rendered 7% of organs unusable, in a pilot European trial. The added cost is in the vicinity of hundred thousand, and the OCS has been applied for a while in DBD hearts and DCD lungs…