UC Irvine Patient Dies After Rare Brain Graft

A woman who received a brain graft at the UC Irvine Medical Center has died of unexplained causes, raising questions about whether the experimental procedure will be performed on other patients as a treatment for Parkinson’s disease.

Medical center officials reported Tuesday that the 60-year-old San Bernardino County woman, who suffered from Parkinson’s, died Dec. 31. The woman had been doing well after brain and abdominal surgery Dec. 18 when, without warning, she suffered cardiac failure and died, UCI neurosurgeon Dr. Leslie Cahan said.

The patient’s name has been withheld at her request and that of her family, medical center officials said.

Cahan said he did not know whether the woman’s death would affect UCI plans to conduct four more experimental surgeries on Parkinson’s patients this year. Cahan and other doctors had been hoping to replicate results of similar surgeries in Mexico City, in which a graft taken from the adrenal gland and injected deep into the brain lessened the disabling symptoms of the degenerative disease.

Cahan said the woman was about to be transferred out of intensive care when she died. “I don’t know whether this was a heart attack,” he said.

So far, he said, an autopsy has not pinpointed the cause of death, but more microscopic analyses from the autopsy were not yet available.

Cahan cautioned that before UCI neurosurgeons go ahead with more of the surgeries, “we need to first get as much information about this case as possible to see if we can find out what the problem was--whether it was preventable or predictable.”

But another of the woman’s surgeons, Dr. Ronald Young, chief of UCI’s division of neurosurgery, added that “unless we find something specific, our plan is to proceed with further surgeries.”

Young noted that brain-graft surgeries are serious operations that carry major risks and that “there have been deaths from the Mexico City surgeries. We’re going to be as careful as possible.”