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There's something unusual about the X-ray above of a man who went to an Italian hospital's emergency room: he had two hearts, and he got double heart attacks!
It turned out that a few years earlier, the man had undergone a procedure known as a heterotopic heart transplant. Unlike an orthotopic transplant, in which one organ is removed and another put in its place, a heterotopic transplant pairs a new organ with a diseased one. [...]
In the case of the ailing Italian, reported in the Annals of Emergency Medicine, the transplant team had mated his new heart with his malfunctioning old one. Chambers and blood vessels of the two hearts were married so that the new heart could support the old one.
But there’s a risk, explained Vukmir. “You can develop two independent heart rhythms, especially in a scenario where one heart gets a little better,” he said.
Dr. Alexander Khoruts, a gastroenterologist, saved a patient by transplanting a piece of her husband’s excrement into her colon:
Dr. Khoruts decided his patient needed a transplant. But he didn’t give her a piece of someone else’s intestines, or a stomach, or any other organ. Instead, he gave her some of her husband’s bacteria.
Dr. Khoruts mixed a small sample of her husband’s stool with saline solution and delivered it into her colon. Writing in the Journal of Clinical Gastroenterology last month, Dr. Khoruts and his colleagues reported that her diarrhea vanished in a day. Her Clostridium difficile infection disappeared as well and has not returned since.
The microbes in the man’s excrement replaced those absent in the patient:
Two weeks after the transplant, the scientists analyzed the microbes again. Her husband’s microbes had taken over. “That community was able to function and cure her disease in a matter of days,” said Janet Jansson, a microbial ecologist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and a co-author of the paper. “I didn’t expect it to work. The project blew me away.”
Link via The Agitator | Photo (unrelated) from Flickr user pnoeric used under Creative Commons license
Shannon Elliott of Long Island, New York lost the thumb and two fingers of her left hand in a fireworks incident. The 25-year-old recently underwent surgery to replace her thumb -with one of her big toes!
“To me it was a no brainer. I’d rather lose a toe and gain a whole hand,” said the mother of two.
Losing a toe has little effect on a human’s ability to walk or run, but losing a thumb nearly incapacitates hand functionality.
Doctors said Elliott will regain full use of her hand in six to nine months.
“She’ll be able to pinch and grasp with her hand, she’ll be able to hold things and pick up her children,” said plastic surgeon Dr. Jason Ganz.
Doctors even expect the new digit to change size in time to more closely resemble a thumb. Warning: graphic picture. Link -via Digg
Doctors in Spain have carried out the world’s first full-face transplant. Although there have already been partial transplants, this was the most complex so far:
It appears to include more bone and much more of the lower part of the face.
A spokesperson for the UK’s Facial Transplantation Research Team, which has ethical permission to carry out a full face transplant, said it was “a tremendous achievement”.
“This appears to be the most complex facial transplant operation carried out so far worldwide,” he said.
“It once again shows how facial transplantation can help a small number of people who are the most severely facially injured and for whom reconstructive surgery cannot and has not worked.”
Link via Gizmodo | Image: Vall D’Hebron Hospital
Dan Coyne of Evanston, Illinois didn’t know anything about Myra de la Vega, except that she was his favorite cashier at the grocery store where he shopped. Two years ago, he noticed her growing thin and asked about her health. She explained that she was on dialysis. Coyne offered to donate one of his kidneys to help her! De la Vega didn’t know if he was serious, but when her sister turned out to be a poor match for a transplant, Coyne insisted on being tested. He was a match.
So, Friday morning, surgeons at Northwestern Memorial Hospital will remove one of Coyne’s healthy kidneys and transplant it to de la Vega, a 49-year-old Filipino immigrant and mother of two who was diagnosed with renal failure three years ago and has continued to work even as she’s undergone dialysis ever since.
The transplant “will give me another 25 or 30 years of life,” de la Vega, clearly still astounded by her customer’s generosity, said Tuesday as she sat with Coyne at Pershing East Magnet School, 3113 S. Rhodes, where he works. “It’s unbelievable: a complete stranger offering his kidney to me.”
Coyne is a social worker at the school. His principal declared Tuesday as “Dan Coyne Day” at the school. Link -via Arbroath
(image credit: Jean Lachat/Sun-Times)
Linda De Croock was injured in a traffic accident 25 years ago that left her with a crushed windpipe. Since then, her throat has been held open by metal stents until a new procedure in organ transplant gave her a new trachea. Dr. Pierre Delaere and his team at the University Hospital in Leuven, Belgium transplanted the windpipe twice to acclimate the patient to the new organ.
The windpipe was taken from a dead man and implanted in her forearm where her own tissue grew around the cartilage scaffold. When the organ came to be transplanted to her throat, her body did not consider it foreign and accepted it.
It is thought to be the first time an organ as large as a windpipe has been implanted into the recipient’s body to develop before the final transplant.
Ms de Croock did not have to take anti-rejection drugs, which meant she was not at risk of complications such as a higher likelihood of cancer.
Dr. Delaere waited a year after the successful surgery before reporting on it to the New England Journal of Medicine. They hope this technique will help other transplant patients live without anti-rejection drugs. Link -via Discover Magazine
(image credit: AP)
As part of their divorce settlement, a doctor in New York state is requesting the return of a kidney he donated to his wife in 2001!
The doctor claims his wife began having an affair sometime after the transplant.
“We were in a million-dollar home, I was a full-time surgeon, full-time father and a dedicated husband. And I saved her life, and there’s nothing bad about what I did, I’d do it again. But the pain is unbearable,” the doctor said.
The unnamed doctor will, however, settle for $1.5 million. Link -Thanks, Gigi1!
Update: Here’s a link with more information on the story.
