THE ESSENTIAL
- The first-ever partial heart transplant from a living donor was performed on a 4-month-old baby in North Carolina, USA.
- The infant, suffering from a very rare anomaly in the heart which could lead to his death, was saved and is in perfect health.
It’s a small miracle. In the United States in North Carolina, Owen Monroe, an infant suffering from an arterial trunk, a serious malformation of the heart, received the very first partial heart transplant from a living donor. This feat saved his life and will save him from further operations. Now 4 months old, he is in perfect health.
The baby would die if the intervention had not taken place
However, at birth little Owen had little hope of survival. The reason: an extremely rare anomaly. His two main arteries had merged because his primitive trunk, when he was a fetus, had not divided into the pulmonary artery and the aorta as it should normally do. Without surgery, the heart would have been quickly overworked, leading to cardiac arrest.
Usually in this situation, dead tissue is used to compensate for the abnormality. But they must be replaced many times before adulthood because the valves do not grow with the child. This congenital heart disease also requires lifelong follow-up and therefore several operations.
The other possibility was a complete heart transplant. But the waiting period is often far too long: it can last up to six months. For Owen’s parents, such an expectation was resigning themselves to the death of their son. The doctors at Duke University Hospitals therefore offered them a somewhat special operation: to separate and replace their baby’s leaking heart valves with living tissue from another newborn.
“It’s a message of hope to all the babies who have to go through this ordeal”
The aim was to allow the valves to grow with the child over time, thereby increasing life expectancy. “This procedure potentially solves the problem of a growing valve”, explains Prof. Joseph W. Turek, chief of pediatric cardiac surgery at Duke, who led the operation. According to him : “If we can eliminate the need for multiple open-heart surgeries each time a child outgrows an old valve, we could extend that child’s life by decades or more.”
The efforts of the team of doctors to achieve this feat have paid off: Owen has shown remarkable growth and improvement since undergoing the operation on April 22, 2022. His heart is developing perfectly. “Not only is he doing well, but he is also blossoming more every day. It’s a tremendous message of hope for all the babies who have to go through this ordeal”said his mother in a video published by Duke University on YouTube.
Duke experts are hopeful that a similar method – a one-time surgery to implant tissue from a living donor that could grow with the child – could be used to treat common valve replacements in affected children. heart defects.
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