By Laura Donnelly, Reprinted from The Daily Telegraph
Three heart transplant patients have been successfully given organs that had stopped beating, a medical breakthrough that could dramatically increase the “donor pool” for such operations.
Donor hearts from adults usually come from those who are confirmed as brain-dead but whose hearts are still beating.
But a medical team in Australia has now revived and transplanted hearts that had stopped beating for up to 20 minutes. Two of the patients are recovering well while the third is in intensive care.
The first said she felt a decade younger and was now a “different person”.
It is predicted the lives of 30 per cent more heart transplant patients could be saved using the “dead” heart procedure.
The operations were carried out at St Vincent’s Hospital in Sydney, Australia, by Professor Kumud Dhital.
Cardiologist Prof Peter MacDonald said the donor hearts were housed in a portable console dubbed a “heart in a box” where they were submerged in a chemical solution and connected to a sterile circuit which kept them beating and warm. He said: “In all our years, our biggest hindrance has been the limited availability of donor organs.” Prof Dhital said dead hearts had been used in the first wave of human heart transplants in the 1960s, with the donor and recipient in adjacent operating theatres. He said: “This co-location of donor and recipient is extremely rare in the current era, leading us to rely solely on brain-dead donors – until now.”
Prof Dhital said he “kicked the air” when the first surgery was successful. It was possible thanks to new technology, he said. “The incredible development of the preservation solution with this technology of being able to preserve the heart, resuscitate it and to assess the function of the heart has made this possible.” he said. The first patient to have the surgery was Michelle Gribilas. The 57-year-old Sydney woman was suffering from congenital heart failure and had surgery about two months ago.
She said: “I was very sick before I had it. Now I am a different person altogether. I feel like I am 40 years old. I am very lucky.”
The second patient, Jan Damen, 43, also suffered from congenital heart failure and had surgery about a fortnight ago. The father of three is still recovering at the hospital. He said: “I feel amazing. I am just looking forward to getting back out into the real world.”
The former carpenter said he often thinks about his donor. He said: “I do think about it, because without the donor I might not be here. I am not religious or spiritual but it is a wild thing to get your head around.”
The team has been working on the project for 20 years. Prof MacDonald said: “We have been researching to see how long the heart can sustain this period in which it has stopped beating.
“We then developed a technique for reactivating the heart in a so called heart in a box machine. To do that we removed blood from the donor to prime the machine and then we take the heart out, connect it to the machine, warm it up and then it starts to beat.”
The donor hearts were each housed in this machine for about four hours before transplantation. Prof MacDonald said: “Based on the performance of the heart on the machine we can then tell quite reliably whether this heart will work if we then go and transplant it. This breakthrough represents a major inroad to reducing the shortage of donor organs.”
Maureen Talbot, senior cardiac nurse at the British Heart Foundation, welcomed the “wonderful” development.
She also suggested that Britain needed to overhaul its organ donor procedure as less than a third of people were signed up as donors.
“We need the rest of the UK to follow Wales’s lead by introducing a soft opt-out system of organ donation where everyone is considered to be a donor unless they opt out,” she said.
