Girl lives 118 days without heart
2008-11-20 07:48
Miami - An American teenager
survived for nearly four months without a heart, kept alive by
a custom-built artificial blood-pumping device, until she was
able to have a heart transplant, doctors in Miami said on
Wednesday.
The doctors said they knew of another case in which an
adult had been kept alive in Germany for nine months without a
heart but said they believed this was the first time a child
had survived in this manner for so long.
The patient, D'Zhana Simmons of South Carolina, said the
experience of living for so long with a machine pumping her
blood was "scary".
"You never knew when it would malfunction," she said, her
voice barely above a whisper, at a news conference at the
University of Miami/Jackson Memorial Medical Centre.
"It was like I was a fake person, like I didn't really
exist. I was just here," she said of living without a heart.
Simmons, 14, suffered from dilated cardiomyopathy, a
condition in which the patient's heart becomes weakened and
enlarged and does not pump blood efficiently.
She had a heart transplant on July 2 at Miami's Holtz
Children's Hospital but the new heart failed to function
properly and was quickly removed.
Two heart pumps made by Thoratec Corp of Pleasanton,
California, were implanted to keep her blood flowing while she
fought a host of ailments and recovered her strength. Doctors
implanted another heart on October 29.
"She essentially lived for 118 days without a heart, with
her circulation supported only by the two blood pumps," said
Dr Marco Ricci, the hospital's director of paediatric cardiac
surgery. During that time, Simmons was mobile but remained
hospitalised.
When an artificial heart is used to sustain a patient, the
patient's own heart is usually left in the body, doctors said.
In some cases, adult patients have been kept alive that way
for more than a year, they said.
"This, we believe, is the first paediatric patient who has
received such a device in this configuration without the heart,
and possibly one of the youngest that has ... been bridged to
transplantation without her native heart," Ricci said.
Simmons also suffered renal failure and had a kidney
transplant the day after the second heart transplant.
Ricci said her prognosis was good. But doctors said there
is a 50% chance that a heart transplant patient will
need a new heart 12 or 13 years after the first surgery.
- Reuters