New science is making it so doctors can take a heart that's been dead for 20 minutes and
implant it in another person.
They're BEATING the odds.
Yeah, that was a bad one.
Heart transplantation surgery is the process of taking a heart from a donor and placing
it another person to help their quality of life.
The first successful heart transplant was in December 1967, and until recently, the
only way to transplant a heart was directly from a cadaver to the recipient; mainly because
the heart has to be kept ALIVE and BEATING (or on ice).
If the heart stops beating, it won't be used for donation because it could be damaged from
a lack of blood supply… ironically.
But doctors in Sydney are starting to change this practice, and to prove their theories
they just implanted a "dead" heart into a patient!
See, most organ donations use a beating-heart cadaver, basically, a brain-dead human body
hooked up to a medical ventilator to keep the organs alive.
Within a few days, doctors can remove the heart, put it in a cooler and fly it to where
it's needed.
Once on ice, they have 4 to 6 hours to get it INTO someone before it's spoiled.
According to one source, only 4% of donors have viable organs, and only a third of those
get used because of this time constraint.
Thus, any advancement which can extend the window in which a heart can viable, will increase
the number of hearts available and used!
The dead heart they used in Sydney wasn't ACTUALLY dead, but it had stopped beating
for 20 minutes.
Normally, they wouldn't use it at all, but because of a machine called a "heart-in-a-box"
made by TransMedics, they were able to restart the heart, fill it with the donors blood,
warm it up, and then assess whether it was still good before implanting it.
This was two months ago.
Today, the woman who got the first one is doing great, and they've done similar operations
on three other patients since!
It's a huge breakthrough for organ donation!
This adds hours more to the process, allowing more hearts to get used!
Yay!!
But if you're like me, you're thinking…
Why don't we just grow a damn heart already?
Well, we're not there yet.
If we can do all this, then why not hearts?
Wouldn't MY heart be better than someone elses?
Well, we're not there yet.
Scientists are able to create beating heart cells, individual cells, in petri dishes,
but constructing a three-dimensional heart is still many years away.
Last year, researchers at the Texas Heart Institute demonstrated they were able to take
a pig's heart, run detergent through it to "strip away lipids, DNA, soluble proteins,
sugars and almost all the other cellular material," and then use what's left, called a extracellular
matrix, to create a new heart.
It's sort of like EXTREME renovation.
They've done this with a human heart too, but e building on the framework of an existing
organ isn't as difficult as building a new one on demand.
That being said, earlier this month, a study in Nature Medicine revealed how doctors used
stem cells from HUMANS to grow functional human intestinal tissue inside of MICE.
And YES, technology from Sahlgrenska University Hospital can grow a whole blood vessel in
a week using stem cells floating in two tablespoons of human blood.
That vessel is essentially the donors own tissue!
The next step is to begin growing the simpler organs like back in April when a company in
the UK made a human ear, or nose…
We've got a long way to go.
*sniff*
Are you an organ donor?
Why or why not?