Woman Stable After Transplant : Doctors Replace Artificial Heart With a Human One
Mary Lund, the first woman to receive an artificial heart, underwent surgery Friday to replace the mechanical pump that has kept her alive for 45 days with a heart from a teen-age girl, authorities said.
The donor heart, which became available Thursday night, was flown to the Twin Cities on a private jet from Billings, Mont., where the 14-year-old girl died. It was then taken by helicopter to Abbott Northwestern Hospital, said spokeswoman Megan O’Hara.
“We don’t expect her (Lund) to awaken until sometime tomorrow,” the spokeswoman said.
Five-Hour Surgery
Surgery for Lund, 40, began at 1 p.m. and was completed five hours later, she said. Lund was in critical but stable condition in the intensive care unit.
Lund, a nursing home secretary from Kensington, Minn., received a smaller version of the Jarvik-7 heart on Dec. 18 after her own heart was damaged, apparently by a virus.
This week was the “optimal time” for Lund to receive a human heart, said Dr. Fredarick Gobel.
Risk of Blood Clots
“We think that prolonging the time for transplantation will increase the risk of her developing serious infections or blood clots,” he said.
The donor heart came from Jyna Marie Forshee, who died Thursday after suffering an epileptic seizure, said Joanne Dodd, a spokeswoman for Deaconess Medical Center in Billings.
The girl’s liver was donated to University of Minnesota Hospitals for transplant purposes, and her kidney was sent to a Seattle hospital.
A procurement team was sent to Billings early Friday to secure the Type O-positive donor heart, according to Mark Dixon, Abbott Northwestern Hospital spokesman.
‘Very Acceptable Heart’
“It appears to be a very acceptable heart,” Dixon said. The necessary cross-matching proved satisfactory, he said.
The transplant team was composed of Drs. Demetre Nicoloff, Joseph Kaiser, Thomas Kersten and Lyle Joyce of the Minneapolis Heart Institute.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has since told doctors not to implant any more mini-Jarvik 7 hearts because more information is needed on the device, which has been used as a bridge to a human heart transplant for others as well as Lund.
Science needs to know how the device affects blood flow and whether it damages blood cells, the FDA said.
Lund’s doctors said the device has functioned flawlessly in her case. Shortly before the FDA announcement, Lund came out of a coma and began making steps toward recovery.
Concern Over Kidneys
Doctors had been concerned about her kidneys, which had not functioned since the artificial heart implant. She received kidney dialysis treatments for some weeks to cleanse her blood.
Dr. John Najarian, head of the heart transplant and kidney transplant teams at the University of Minnesota, had said implanting a human heart while the kidneys were not functioning could permanently damage those organs.
But doctors placed Lund on a waiting list for a donor heart Jan. 9 and said her kidneys were functioning almost normally.
Twelve men received artificial hearts before Lund’s implant, and four are still alive. She is the sixth person to receive a human heart after surviving with an artificial heart. Of the six, two others are alive.
