Published 15 July 2009, doi:10.1136/bmj.b2867
Cite this as: BMJ 2009;339:b2867

News

Girl is healthy after having donor heart removed

Daniel M Henderson

1 BMJ

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

A 16 year old girl is fit and well three and a half years after the removal of a donor heart that had been transplanted alongside her own. The donor heart had been in place for 10 and a half years, allowing her own heart to recover from advanced cardiomyopathy.

Hannah Clark presented with signs of severe heart failure, secondary to idiopathic dilated cardiomyopathy, at the age of 8 months, a paper in the Lancet has reported (doi:10.1016/S0140-6736(09)61201-0). When she was 2 years old she underwent a heterotopic cardiac transplantation, in which the donor heart was placed in the right pleural cavity and attached to Hannah’s own heart, and long term immunosuppression was begun. The insertion of the donor heart allowed long term reduction in left ventricular pressure and the consequent recovery of Hannah’s heart.

Two of the report’s authors, Magdi Yacoub, professor of cardiothoracic surgery at Imperial . . . [Full text of this article]


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