World’s Longest-Surviving Transplant Patient Dies

Willem Van Buuren, the world’s longest heart transplant survivor, has died of pneumonia. He was 62.

Van Buuren, who lived for almost 22 years with his second heart, was admitted to the Stanford University Hospital Monday after he felt some chest pains, said Spyros Andreopoulos, a Stanford spokesman. Described as an “evangelist for transplantation,” he was diagnosed with pneumonia and died Wednesday.

Van Buuren was 40 years old when Dr. Norman Shumway of Stanford University performed the surgery to replace his ailing heart. At the time, organ transplants were in the realm of exotic experimentation. Only 10% of the patients lived for a year after surgery. Now, about 90% of heart transplant patients live for at least one year.

In 1963, Van Buuren had emigrated to the United States from the Netherlands with his wife, Corrie and three young children. Six years later, a series of heart attacks destroyed 80% of his heart function. At the time of the surgery, doctors believed he had only three weeks to live.

Over the next 22 years, however, Van Buuren’s new heart functioned well. Doctors attributed his longevity to a good match with the heart donor and a strict, low-salt diet. But Van Buuren had said in the early 1980s that, although he had given up smoking, he was not such a fanatic about his diet and often drank a glass of wine or beer. Asked what his doctors thought of that, he chuckled, “I don’t tell them everything.”

“In the early days, if I had a cold, I was off to the hospital,” he said. “Now I don’t call them--unless I know it’s serious. I don’t want to go to the hospital. Hospitals are boring.”

After the surgery, Van Buuren consumed 20 to 25 pills a day, including steroids, a diuretic and an anti-coagulant to keep his body from rejecting the heart. Doctors said the drugs impaired his concentration, sapped his energy and supressed his immunological system, making him more susceptible to infection.

But the drugs were only a minor annoyance to Van Buuren. “I have enjoyed my life these last 16 years,” he said in 1986. “Maybe I have enjoyed it a little more because of the transplant. You realize you’re vulnerable.”

Though Van Buuren had to slow down after the surgery, he was active in the hospital’s heart transplant support group, offering hope to other patients.

Van Buuren also became friends with Emmanuel Vitria, a Frenchman who lived for 18 years after a heart transplant. Vitria died in 1987.

“We got a pretty good conversation going,” Van Buuren said of his first meeting with Vitria, who was then the longest surviving heart transplant patient. “I found his philosophy was pretty much like mine. You accept the facts. You go on from there.”

Van Buuren, who lived in Marin City, is survived by his wife, two daughters and a son.