Heart transplant is a surgical procedure to remove a person’s diseased heart (orthotopic approach) and replace by a healthy heart from an organ donor. Less commonly, heart transplant can be carried out without the removal of diseased heart and a healthy heart will be positioned (heterotopic approach) to encourage the recovery of the diseased heart of the recipient.
Cardiac surgeons will only perform heart transplantation, if only congestive heart failure was diagnosed in the patient. And there are many requirements need to be fulfilled for the transplantation to be carried out successfully. One of the limiting factors of the heart transplantation is the number of organ donors. Approximately 5000 cardiac transplants are performed in the world annually. More 2000 heart transplants are performed in the U.S yearly.
According to Fishbein, MD who specializes in cardiovascular pathology (2007), patients are required to change their lifestyle and take numerous immunosuppressive drugs. All potential recipients must undergo psychological evaluation to become qualified recipients. Most importantly, the immune system of the patient must compatible to the donor’s heart to decrease the risk of getting post-surgical complication.
In the U.S., United Network for Organ Sharing (UNOS) was established to provide services that are related to organ transplantation, including organ allocation, education for the public, policies development and so on.
Besides, the survival rate of heart transplant keeps rising due to the advancement of biomedical technology from time to time. It is believed that heart transplant will bring great improvement to the patients’ lives. They would be able to enjoy the daily activities after the recovery period.
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...g immunosuppressant, recipients are required to take immunosuppressant for most of the cardiac transplant.
4.2 Cardiac xenotransplantation
Cardiac xenotransplantation may improve the current shortage of transplantable hearts. Researchers still carrying research to study the mechanism of anti-Gal antibody and the elimination of α 1,3 galactose (αGal) carbohydrate antigen to reduce the risks of rejection of xeno-donors’ hearts). It is predicted that cardiac xenotransplantation may be an alternative of human heart transplant.
On the other hand, there are some who oppose xenotransplantation based on principle of animal rights and some religious perspectives. Also the potential of recipients getting xenozoonosis still remains unknown. Researchers are trying to find out a solution to overcome antibody mediated rejection before proceed to clinical trial
Attention Getter: A week and a half ago, there was a news article reporting that Dr. Bud Frazier was being honored for performing the most heart transplants nationwide. Specifically, he performed 1,500 heart transplants and implanted 1,000 left ventricular assist devices. He is also the man who invented the device. Where did the remarkable research and advances begin for organ transplants in human beings, and how did it make progress?
The term “medical transplant” is referred to the process of organ donation. In current modern trends, the world is moving towards the fifth generation. The new innovative medical techniques have enabled the people to reform from severe diseases. The phenomenon of organ donation and transplant is based on two primary persons. It involves surgical process to remove a body organ and tissue form from donor and fitting it into the body of recipient. In addition, the transplant that is performed within same body is called auto graft. Medical transplant that is performed in between to different bodies of same species is called allografts (Hewitt, 2008). The main reason of medical transplantation and organ donation is any injury and disease which prohibit the organ to work in proper condition.
Often, when the heart of an individual fails, the brain, the intestines, and the lungs will usually fail as well. Thus in choosing an individual, they had to find a person who only had cardiac complications and no associated organ failure. They also had to find a patient that was not eligible for a traditional heart transplant.
It is estimated that there are nearly 50,000 people around the world that are in need of heart transplants. The average wait time for a donor heart is four to six months. For a patient with end-stage heart failure, a ventricular assist device or total artificial heart may be viable options to serve as a bridge to heart transplantation (Trivedi, 2014).
Brendan Maher, in his article “How to Build a Heart” discusses doctor’s and engineer’s research and experimentation into the field of regenerative medicine. Maher talks about several different researchers in this fields. One is Doris Taylor, the director of regenerative medicine at the Texas Heart Institute in Houston. Her job includes harvesting organs such as hearts and lungs and re-engineering them starting with the cells. She attempts to bring the back to life in order to be used for people who are on transplant waiting lists. She hopes to be able to make the number of people waiting for transplants diminish with her research but it is a very difficult process. Maher says that researchers have had some successes when it comes to rebuilding organs but only with simples ones such as a bladder. A heart is much more complicated and requires many more cells to do all the functions it needs to. New organs have to be able to do several things in order for them to be used in humans that are still alive. They need to be sterile, able to grow, able to repair themselves, and work. Taylor has led some of the first successful experiments to build rat hearts and is hopeful of a good outcome with tissue rebuilding and engineering. Scientists have been able to make beating heart cells in a petri dish but the main issue now is developing a scaffold for these cells so that they can form in three dimension. Harold Ott, a surgeon from Massachusetts General Hospital and studied under Taylor, has a method that he developed while training. Detergent is pumped into a glass chamber where a heart is suspended and this detergent strips away everything except a layer of collagen, laminins, and other proteins. The hard part according to Ott is making s...
Many ailments can be cured or at least ameliorated by the replacement of an organ and the progression of medical science has increasingly allowed more types of organs to be successfully transplanted. Doctors’ ability to transplant is thwarted, however, by the disproportionate number of patients in need of such life-saving treatment relative to the number of donor organs available. Due to a variety of circumstances there just aren’t enough spare organs to go around. In light of this situation and the ever increasing number of people who die every year while waiting for an organ donor, xenotransplantation has become a very attractive alternative to human transplants, for obvious reasons. While there may be a shortage of human organ donors, we can easily envision animals being bred for their organs and providing an almost unlimited supply.
In the world we’re living in today, many kinds of diseases, infections, and viruses are continuously arising. At the same time, scientists are untiringly researching about how we can prevent or cure them. Unfortunately, millions of people have been affected and sick that some of their organs fail that results to the need of organ replacement. Many people have died because no organs have been available to provide the need of organ replacements. The shortage of organ replacement has been a bioethical issue since then and it seems like no solution has been available. However, due to the studies scientists have been conducting, they found the most possible answer to this issue – Xenotransplantation. It hasn’t become very popular all over the
Currently more than 118,617 men, women, and children are waiting for a transplant. With this high demand of organ transplants there is a need of supply. According to the OPTN Annual report of 2008, the median national waiting time for a heart transplant is 113 days, 141 days for lungs, 361 days for livers, 1219 days for kidneys, 260 days for pancreas, 159 days for any part of the intestine. With this world of diseases and conditions, we are in desperate desideratum of organs. Organ transplants followed by blood into a donating organ transfusions, are ways medical procedures are helping better the lives of the patients.
It is essential to the human body that the heart pump sufficient nutrient rich blood to the body’s cells, because the body won’t be able to function normally otherwise. When a heart muscle is unable to pump enough blood through to meet the body’s regular demand it is characterized as heart failure. Heart failure can usually be treated through conventional heart therapies and symptom management strategies, however conventional therapies don’t work for all patients with heart failure, this is what is depicted as advanced heart failure or end-stage heart failure. In other words “End stage” heart failure is when the condition becomes so severe that all conventional treatments no longer work, the only treatment that works for end stage heart failure is to have a heart transplantation-surgery to remove a person's diseased heart and replace it with a healthy heart from a deceased donor. However there are two large encompassing problems with this treatment. The first problem is that the patient is subject to shortages in donor organ availability and thus possible further decompensation and potential death while awaiting transplantation. According to the American Heart Association, there are over 500,000 new cases of end-stage heart failure in the United States every year. With only 2200 donor hearts available every year nearly 20-30% of the patients who die while they await a transplant. The second problem with this mode of treatment is that not all patients qualify for heart transplantation. Patients who have another disease in addition to end-stage heart failure do not qualify for heart transplantation. The discrepancy between the clinical need for donor hearts and the total number of hearts available, as well as the lack of treatment o...
Organ Transplantation is often the best way of saving human life when a vital organ
Xenotransplantation is the transplantation of organs, tissues or cells from one species to another. Although currently it is only at a preclinical stage, in the near future xenotransplantation could solve the problem of the severe shortage of human organs available for transplant. Currently in the United States, “13 patients die each day waiting to receive a life-saving transplant to replace a diseased organ” 1 The deficiency of donor tissues such as pancreatic islets is also increasing, with statistics in 2002 showing that approximately 140 million people in the world have diabetes but only several thousand pancreatic glands become available annually. 2 This shortage could also be addressed by xenotransplantation using pancreatic islets from
However, use of pig xenografts is associated with major immunologic barriers, resulting in Hyper Acute Rejection (HAR) or Acute Vascular Rejection (AVR) when transplanted into a human recipient as humans have naturally occurring antibodies against pig cells. To resolve this issue genetically engineered pigs have been designed to reduce the expression of various immunogenic substances. Further the graft is given a break from attack when ci...
This limited availability of human organs and tissues, coupled with recent technological advances, has increasingly led to the implantations of living cells from other species when human donors are not available, when a bridge organ is needed, or when animal cells may provide some sort of unique benefit. This is called xenotransplantation. Xenotransplantation is perhaps the most talked about area in the medical community today as it involves the loaded issue of cloning and gene mutation. Although a large portion of the material found on xenotransplantation focuses on the transpl...
It is crucial that the affected person applies for a liver transplant. A liver transplant is an operation in which the patient’s damaged liver is replaced with a healthy liver from a donor.¬ There are three main types of liver transplant: orthotopic transplant, the most common type of transplant, where the patient’s liver is replaced by a liver from a deceased donor; living donor transplant, where a living person willingly donates his liver for the patient; and split type of liver transplant: where the liver of a deceased donor is split into the two lobes and given to two recipients, applicable if the patients are an adult and a child (Mandal, n.d.
This is the story of Christiaan Barnard an excellent African cardiac surgeon who performed the first human-to human heart transplant. He was born in Beaufort west, Cape Province, Union of South Africa on November eight, 1922. He grew up in Beaufort West and his family wasn’t rich. Adam Barnard, his father, was a church pastor and his mother, Maria, played church organ. Christiaan Barnard lost one of his four brothers, Adam, because he had a heart problem disease. Adam died at the age of five. In 1940, he matriculated from the Beufort West High School. Five years later, he obtained his Bachelor of Medicine of Surgery at the University of Cape Town.