Heart Patient Has Severe Setback--Later Rebounds

Artificial heart recipient Anthony Mandia lapsed into critical and unstable condition Tuesday with reduced brain function but later rebounded and spoke to his brother, doctors said.

“See if you can get me something to eat,” was Mandia’s midday request of his brother, Ernest, said Dr. John W. Burnside, a spokesman for the Hershey Medical Center. “His level of consciousness is clearly higher,” Burnside added.

The 44-year-old Mandia, who had been listed in critical and stable condition after receiving the Penn State artificial heart on Friday, remained in critical and unstable condition Tuesday afternoon, said Burnside.

A hoped-for transplant of a human heart had been arranged for Monday evening, and Mandia had signed a consent form at 10 p.m. But around the same time, the donor heart failed, and, by 11 p.m., Mandia’s condition began to worsen as he started slipping in and out of consciousness, Burnside said.

‘It Is a Setback’

By 3 a.m., Mandia was “stuporous and arousable only to painful stimuli,” said Burnside. “It is a setback.”

He said doctors suspect Mandia is suffering from spasms of the brain’s blood vessels. While not life-threatening, the spasms could lead to permanent brain damage, although there is no evidence of that so far, Burnside said.

Burnside said doctors had no idea how the condition could be related to the Penn State heart, which was designed only as a temporary means of keeping a heart patient alive long enough for a donor organ to be found.

Among the causes doctors considered for the brain problems were the blood pressure medication and anti-seizure drugs Mandia has been receiving since the surgery or a deficiency of the nutrient thiamine, Burnside said. He said the blood pressure drug was stopped and the anti-seizure drug reduced, but no direct connection has yet been established.