14 DAY TRIAL // A report published this past Thursday details Europe's first ever transplant of a non-beating heart. The procedure was carried out at Papworth Hospital in Cambridgeshire, UK, earlier this month.
The medical experts who handled the case say that, prior to the intervention, the patient, identified as 60-year-old Huseyin Ulucan from London, had trouble even walking on his own.
Now that he has a brand new heart, the man feels much better and his family trusts that they can leave him unattended, be it only for a short while. In the months to come, his condition will continue to improve.
“He is making remarkable progress - spending only four days in the Critical Care Unit and is now recovering well at home,” the 60-year-old's doctors at Papworth Hospital said in a statement.
The man was transplanted a resuscitated heart
Until not very long ago, the hearts used in transplant surgeries were all beating ones taken from patients who, although brain dead, still had blood pumping through their body.
The heart that 60-year-old Huseyin Ulucan received, however, was a non-beating one. Plainly put, the man was transplanted a dead heart that surgeons managed to resuscitate.
True, the procedure that Huseyin Ulucan was subjected to earlier this month is the first of its kind to have until now been successfully performed anywhere in Europe.
Still, the fact of the matter is that, towards the end of 2014, several other such interventions involving resuscitated hearts were successfully carried out by surgeons in Australia.
The heart the 60-year-old Papworth Hospital patient received was resuscitated while still inside the body of the donor. The organ was not removed for about an hour after resuscitation.
Before transplanting it, doctors monitored the heart for about 3 hours, during which time they kept it in a special machine and had blood and nutrients delivered to it to make sure it stayed alive.
Surgeries like this one bring new hope to heart sufferers
The Papworth Hospital team of surgeons hope that, in time, non-beating heart transplants like the one they performed on 60-year-old Huseyin Ulucan will become mainstream.
The medical experts explain that the use of non-beating hearts in transplant surgeries means that more patients can hope to receive a donor organ and thus overcome their health trouble.
“The use of this group of donor hearts could increase heart transplantation by up to 25% in the UK alone,” surgeon Stephen Large commented on the importance of this breakthrough in an interview.