Dead Heart Transplant Australia: St. Vincent's Hospital, located in Sydney, Australia has done a new breakthrough in surgery as they have alleged to be the first ones to do a transplant of a dead heart.
Up to the moment, the donors that have "given" their hearts for transplant were reportedly brain dead but the heart was still beating. Now, the transplant of dead hearts has been done three times already in the Australian hospital.
The procedure includes a machine called "heart-in-a-box" and what it does mainly, is to keep the heart warm before it is transplanted from one person to another.
The dead hearts have up to 20 minutes of time in the organism before being removed in order to later on be resuscitated with the help of the "heart-in-a-box" machine.
The first surgery was done two months ago to Ms Gribilas, a 57-year-old woman who had a congenital heart failure and appeared today in front of the media together with Jan Damen, the second surgery, to show their improved condition.
"I was very sick before I had it. Now I'm a different person altogether. I feel like I'm 40 years old. I'm very lucky," Gribilas said on the dead heart transplant surgery and The Australian noted.
Professor MacDonald, the head of the Australian Heart Transplant Unit in the hospital has confessed that the team had actually been working to achieve this breakthrough for twenty years and more intensively for the past four.
"This breakthrough represents a major inroad to reducing the shortage of donor organs," he has shared and BBC noted.
One problem with heart transplants is that there is a shortage of donors. The fact that the heart needs to be alive throughout the process represented a major odd for surgeons.
Now, thanks to this unique breakthrough that St. Vincent, the Australian hospital has done which permits dead hearts to be transplanted, things will probably and surely take a turn for the better and more lives will be saved.
