Girl, Mother Recovering After Lung Transplant
A 12-year-old girl and her 46-year-old mother continued to recover Friday at Stanford University Medical Center after a potentially life-saving experimental operation in which the child received a portion of her mother’s lung.
“At this time, things have gone very well,” said Dr. Vaughn A. Starnes, the chief surgeon for the operation, which is believed to have been the first of its kind in the world.
“The mom and the child are both off the ventilators,” Starnes said at a press conference. “They are both awake and alert. The mom has seen the daughter and the daughter has waved back.”
The child suffers from a rare, invariably fatal lung disease known as bronchopulmonary dysplasia. Without surgery, she was expected to have died within 12 to 18 months, her surgeon said.
At the request of the family, names and personal details have not been disclosed, but Starnes said the mother and daughter might meet with the press as early as next week, if their recoveries continue smoothly.
“It was a big step for both mother and daughter,” Starnes said. “They are still adjusting to the idea of what was just done and they are both still getting pain medicines for their incisions.”
The surgery is considered highly experimental because fewer than 20 lung transplants have been performed in children and because of the potential risk of the surgery to the mother.
Starnes, the director of Stanford’s heart-lung transplant program, said the mother’s risks “are over” from the surgery, in which the upper lobe of her right lung was removed. In contrast he said the daughter “is like any transplanted patient. You cannot really predict with certainty the long-term outcome.”
Starnes said a living, related donor was used, instead of a dead, unrelated donor, to try to lessen the possibility the child’s body will reject the transplant and because of a shortage of suitable organs from cadavers.
Nevertheless, he cautioned that “the problem of rejection still faces her. Although this is a better match, it is not a perfect match.”
As is standard in lung transplants, the girl has been started on anti-rejection medicines. She is expected to remain in the hospital for three weeks and, if all goes well, resume school and other activities a few months later.
Lung transplants are less commonly performed than heart, liver, or kidney transplants, in part because the death and complication rates have been high. But surgeons have made considerable progress in the last several years in improving the one-year survival rate, which is now about 70%.
A barrier, however, is chronic rejection of the transplanted lung that often causes marked limits on activity or death two to four years after the initial surgery. “The issue is not whether this operation produced a better (short-term) result,” Starnes said. “I don’t think it did. . . . Our hope is that it will produce a better long-term result.”
