First Heart Transplant

Heart transplantation, or cardiac transplantation, is a surgical transplant procedure performed on patients with end-stage heart failure or severe coronary artery disease. The most common procedure is to take a working heart from a recently deceased organ donor (allograft) and implant it into the patient. The patient's own heart may either be removed (orthotopic procedure) or, less commonly, left in to support the donor heart (heterotopic procedure); both are controversial solutions to one of the most enduring human ailments. Post-operation survival periods now average 15 years.

Worldwide there are 3,500 heart transplants performed every year; about 800,000 people have a Class IV heart defect and need a new organ. This disparity has spurred considerable research into the use of non-human hearts since 1993. It is now possible to take a heart from another species (xenograft), or implant a man-made artificial one, although the outcome of these two procedures has been less successful in comparison to the far more commonly performed allografts. Engineers want to fix the remaining problems with the manufactured options in the next 15 years.

The first heart transplant involving a human was carried out by a team led by Dr James D. Hardy on the of 23 of January 1964 at the University of Mississippi Medical Center, when the heart of a chimpanzee was transplanted into the chest of a dying man. The heart beat for only 90 minutes before stopping. The procedure raised a series of ethical and moral questions, and received copious amounts of publicity. However, it also helped pave the way for human-to-human heart transplants.

The first human-to-human heart transplant was performed by cardiac surgeon Christiaan Barnard at Groote Schuur Hospital in South Africa on the 3^rd December, 1967 by a team led by Dr. Christiaan Barnard. The patient was Louis Washkansky of Cape Town, South Africa, who lived for 18 days after the procedure before dying of pneumonia. Barnard transplanted a healthy heart from a deceased patient, the donor, Denise Darvall, who was rendered brain dead in a car accident.

The first successful heart transplant in the United States was done at Stanford University by doctor Norman Shumway in January, 1968. Subsequently, another transplant was done at St. Luke's Episcopal Hospital in Houston, Texas by Denton Cooley in June 1968. The donor was a teenage suicide victim (who had had an aortic coarctation repaired as a young child, also by Dr. Cooley) and the recipient, Mr. Thomas, had terminal severe cardiomyopathy. He survived 8 months before dying of rejection of the transplanted heart. A series of five subsequent heart transplants were done that month by Dr. Cooley followed by a number of transplants in Houston that year before the program was canceled, leaving only Norman Shumway at Stanford University doing heart transplants and research on the rejection phenomenon.

On 27 April 1968, French surgeon Christian Cabrol performed the first European heart transplantation in the Paris Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital. The patient was a 66 year old man, Clovis Roblain, who survived 53 hours before dying of a pulmonary embolism.

In 1984, at two years old, Elizabeth Craze became the youngest surviving heart transplant patient. Another followed shortly in 1988, when Kimberly Martinez received a heart transplant at the age of three months old from Stanford University. At one year old, she developed lymphoma which required the removal of three-fourths of her lung. She fully recovered and since 1989 has had no further problems.

The concept of heart transplantation dates back to at least 400 AD in China. The book of Liezi tells a story of Bian Que exchanging the hearts of two warriors to balance their personal characteristics.^[6]