Surgeons at the University of Maryland Medical Center in Baltimore have transplanted a pig heart into a man. How is the patient doing a few weeks later?
Baltimore – The patient, who had the world’s first transplant of a pig heart, continues to make good progress, according to his doctors. “He’s doing better than we expected,” said Muhammad Mohiuddin, chief surgeon at the University of Maryland Medical Center in Baltimore, in a video released Thursday by the university hospital. “His heart is fine, there is no sign of rejection.”
The surgery lasted eight hours
In a milestone in the field of organ transplantation, the genetically modified organ was implanted in the 57-year-old suffering from a life-threatening heart disease at the beginning of January. According to US media, the operation lasted around eight hours. The veterinarian Heiner Niemann from the Hannover Medical School told the dpa that it was a man who was no longer on the waiting list for a donor heart because of violation of the specifications and for whom the animal organ was the last alternative to death . After the operation, the patient remained on a heart-lung machine for a few days.
Patient receives physical therapy
The man was “remarkably alert,” said surgeon Bartley Griffith. “If I get to the window of his room, he usually notices and knows what’s going on. He then waves me over and asks me when he can go home – and as long as he asks me he has – I think – the right attitude.” The patient gets physical therapy. “We need to make his legs strong enough to carry him again. So far that’s not possible.”
It will probably be a while before the patient can be discharged, said Mohiuddin. “We look at it every day. Every day is a new day for us and we are glad that we don’t see any rejection or other problems. But it’s slow progress and we don’t expect him to be able to go home any time soon.” But be optimistic. “Hopefully one day he’ll be able to go home and walk his dog the way he wants.”
The so-called xenotransplantation has been researched since the 1980s. Pigs are particularly suitable as donors because their metabolism is similar to that of humans.