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 …