Surgeons revive ‘dead’ heart for infant transplant at Duke varsity

In a landmark medical achievement, surgeons at Duke University have successfully revived a “dead” heart on the operating table and transplanted it into a three-month-old baby, saving the child’s life.

The novel method, called “on-table reanimation”, uses a specially made device to bring the donor heart back to life outside of the donor’s body.

Using an oxygenator, a centrifugal pump, and a hanging reservoir to catch blood that was expelled, surgeons revitalised a tiny donor heart on the operating table with the family’s permission.

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Because the present care systems that keep organs alive outside of bodies are too large for infant hearts, this device had to be specially made.

Six months after the transplant, the baby’s heart function was normal, and there were no indications of organ rejection. This discovery may expand the pool of eligible donors by as much as 30%, giving newborns in need of heart transplants new hope.

Aaron Williams, one of the study’s authors in the article published in the New England Journal of Medicine, said the new method has similar outcomes to existing methods but is simpler and much less expensive.

He said the technique has great potential to expand the number of donor hearts available by making organ preservation technology more widely available worldwide and increasing the use of donation after circulatory death (DCD) hearts.

DCD hearts refer to hearts donated after circulatory death (DCD), a process where organs are recovered for transplantation after a donor’s circulatory function has irretrievably ceased. This differs from traditional heart donation after brain death (DBD) by the criteria used to determine death and the process of organ recovery.

According to him, “It’s something that has never been done in the field of heart transplantation with success. I think this is going to be a game changer. This is going to be a technique that’s going to essentially have worldwide applicability.”

However, some critics dispute the morality of taking a terminal patient off life support, getting their heart beating again, and then removing it for transplantation.

Concerns arise over declarations of death and how to reanimate organs ethically.

Only 0.5 per cent of paediatric heart transplants are donated after circulatory death, when the heart stops beating and blood stops circulating. So many infants in need will die waiting for a heart.