Dead Heart Transplant Australia - The recent procedure done by a team at St Vincent's Hospital in Sydney is considered the world's first transplant of a "dead heart." According to the doctors, the dead heart transplant Australia can significantly increase the number of potential donor organs.
The Australian doctors revived and then transplanted so-called "dead hearts", which had already stopped beating for up to 20 minutes. They called the procedure a "paradigm shift" which could reportedly boost the host of suitable donor hearts available to patients with end-stage heart disease for transplant.
The dead heart transplant Australia procedure is the first of its kind, said researchers from St. Vincent's Hospital in Sydney and the Victor Chang Cardiac Research Institute.
"This is something that we have been researching really over the last four years can sustain this period where the heart has stopped beating. Having done that we have developed a technique for then reactivating the heart," said Prof. Peter MacDonald, a cardiologist and the one leading the team.
Involving "heart-in-a-box" machine, where the "dead heart" is revived after it has stopped beating, the novel technique used in the dead heart transplant Australia was based upon the development of a unique organ-preservation solution which had been injected into the heart.
The heart was kept warm inside the box, its beating restored and the nourishing organ-preservation solution helps prevent further damage to the heart's muscles during the dead heart transplant Australia procedure.
"We warm it up and the heart starts to beat. When its beating we can measure the metabolism of the heart and based on the performance of the heart on the machine we can tell quite reliably whether this heart will work," said MacDonald.
The "heart in a box," a portable console, was initially developed to accommodate, revive and transport donor organs. It is gaining more recognition now since hearts are the only organ not used in the body as a donor organ after the heart has stopped beating. This kind of donation is reportedly known as donation after circulatory death.
The box provided a way for the organ-transplant team to connect the donor heart to an electronic path to keep it warm and alive during the dead heart transplant Australia procedure.
In the 1960s, the era when heart transplants was introduced, it was routine to use "dead" hearts from patients after circulatory death, but this was only made possible since the donor and recipient are adjacent to reach other during operation, according to Kumud Dhital from St Vincent's Hospital.
"This collocation of donor and recipient is extremely rare in the current era, leading us to rely solely on brain-dead donors - until now," said Dhital.
Hearts are normally kept inside the body of a brain-dead donor to keep it beating through the use of use of life-support. They are then kept on ice for around four hours and then transplanted to patients. However, this puts a time limit on how long they can be kept as the organs can soon deteriorate, especially when they stop beating after they are removed, according to The Independent.
57-year-old Michelle Gribilas was reported the first person to have the dead heart transplant Australia surgery. Gribilas suffered from congenital heart failure and she had the surgery more than two months ago, reports the BBC.
"I was very sick before I had it. Now I'm a different person altogether. I feel like I'm 40 years old. I'm very lucky," said Gribilas.
Another man from Sydney, 40-year-old Jan Damen, 40, was also among the first patients to benefit from the procedure.
MacDonald said the technique has already been used to some degree in liver, kidney and lung transplantation. Two transplanted patients have recovered well already.
Not only has the dead heart transplant Australia a success, but the procedure also showed allowance for longer time in the transportation and retrieval of "marginal hearts" which have been considered unsuitable for transplant, according to the Wall Street Journal.
"Up until now no one has attempted to recover hearts from these donors to transplant them," said the doctor.
"Machine perfusion is an opportunity to improve the number and quality of organs available for transplant, said James Neuberger, associate medical director at UK's NHS Blood and Transplant service.
"We look forward to more work being carried out to determine the impact of this technology on increasing the number of organs that can safely be used for transplant and on improving the quality of those organs," he added.
"It is too early to predict how many lives could be saved through transplantation each year if this technology were to be adopted as standard transplant practice in the future," Neuberger said hoping.
The heart-in-a-box used in the dead heart transplant Australia procedure is currently tested at different sites around the world, with the British Heart Foundation even calling it a "significant development".
The dead heart transplant Australia procedure is a breakthrough could save countless lives, amounting up to 30% more lives saved through more available organs.
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