In a world first, doctors at St Vincent’s Hospital have managed to transplant a heart that had stopped beating.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4zeOrTZjIvo
The donor heart wasn’t beating for up to 20 minutes before it was resuscitated and successfully transplanted.
The heart was brought back to life, then placed on a machine, before it was injected with a ground breaking preservation solution – developed by the Victor Chang Cardiac Research Institute and St Vincent’s Hospital.
It’s believed 30 percent more lives will be saved using this new technique.
The Preservation Solution:
- Reduces the amount of damage to the heart
- Makes the heart more resilient to transplantation
- Reduces the number of heart muscle cells that die
- Improves heart function when it is restarted
- Limits damage from a lack of oxygen
- The preservation solution took 12 years to perfect
Why this is so ground breaking
Until now, Transplant Units have solely relied on donor hearts from brain-dead patients whose hearts are still beating. The new technique now allows doctors to transplant hearts that have stopped beating.
This represents a paradigm shift in organ donation and will result in a major increase in the pool of hearts available for transplantation.
How they did it
A surgical team at St. Vincent’s Hospital in Sydney took a non-beating donor heart and revived it in a machine called a “heart-in-a-box,” BBC News reported.
In this device, the heart is kept warm and bathed in a nutrient-rich fluid that helps minimize any damage to the cardiac muscle.
Michelle Gribilas, 57, suffered from congenital heart failure and was the first person to receive such a heart. She told the BBC, “Now I’m a different person altogether. I feel like I’m 40 years old — I’m very lucky.”
Two more successful non-beating heart transplants have followed her case, the hospital said.
Experts believe the “heart-in-a-box” technique, also known as machine perfusion, might lead to a 30 percent increase in the availability of a variety of organs for transplant.
“This breakthrough represents a major inroad to reducing the shortage of donor organs,” Peter MacDonald, head of the heart transplant unit at St. Vincent’s, told the BBC.
Last Updated: Oct. 27, 2014
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