Part of Parents’ Lungs Implanted in Woman : Medicine: It is the first time that living donors have been used to treat a cystic fibrosis patient. The procedure may help alleviate a shortage of organs.

In a unique operation, USC surgeons on Friday transplanted lung segments from a mother and father into their 22-year-old daughter, whose lungs had failed as the result of scarring from cystic fibrosis.

The operation is the first time a living donor has been used to treat a cystic fibrosis patient, according to Dr. Vaughn A. Starnes, who performed the operation at University Hospital. It is also the first in which two donors have been used in a lung transplant.

Friday’s operation was also unusual in that Starnes--long a pioneer in lung transplants--took only one of five lung lobes from each parent. He transplanted the lower left lobe from 55-year-old James Sewell and the lower right lobe from 49-year-old Barbara Sewell into their daughter Stacy. The left human lung has two lobes; the right has three.

The new procedure “could have a very important long-term impact because of the shortage of organ donors,” Starnes said in a news conference Friday.

All three family members were listed in critical condition--the usual condition after transplant surgery--after the five-hour procedure performed in three operating rooms, but they are “doing very well,” Starnes said.

Lung transplants from cadavers have become common, but not routine, for cystic fibrosis patients, said Dr. Robert Dresing, president of the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation. “But I’ve never heard of both parents doing it,” he said. “This is certainly a first.”

Dresing noted that the success rate and the survival rate for single lung transplants is very high. Lung transplants “are a wonderful procedure, but they are certainly not a panacea.”

According to hospital officials, there have been more than 1,400 operations in which one or both lungs have been transplanted from cadavers, but only six prior transplants of single lobes, three of them performed by Starnes. One lobe was enough in those cases because all were infants suffering from congenital malformations. Two of the three patients treated by Starnes are alive.

One lobe would not provide adequate lung capacity for an adult, however, said Dr. Bruce Reitz, a transplant surgeon at Stanford University Medical Center. But it would not be acceptable to take more than one lobe from a living donor either.

“One doesn’t want to take too much of the pulmonary reserve away from a person who is healthy,” Reitz said. So using two donors, he added, is “appropriate” and is probably the best choice.

Stacy Sewall had been very ill and in and out of hospitals for most of the past year, Starnes said. “Every breath was a struggle for this young woman,” he added.

She had been on a waiting list to receive whole lungs from cadavers but was not at the top of the list and recently took a turn for the worse, according to Dr. Richard Barbers, a USC internist and medical transplant director. Starnes said she had only a week to live and that the high-risk transplant was the only chance for an extension of her life.

Starnes and his colleagues began the operation on the three family members--all from Quartz Hill, near Lancaster--about 7:30 a.m. Friday and finished at 12:30 p.m. Her diseased lungs were removed and replaced with the parents’ two lobes.

Stacy Sewell is a “petite person,” weighing about 95 pounds, and the operation gave her more lung capacity than she had before, Barbers said. The parents have enough reserve lung capacity that “they will not miss the lobes,” he said. “We’re putting the parents at minimal risk.”

Cystic fibrosis affects about 30,000 Americans. Its primary effect is the accumulation of mucus in the lungs that makes breathing difficult and promotes life-threatening bacterial infections. Although CF victims once died in their teens, new treatment methods that clear mucus and reduce infections routinely extend their lives into their 30s and 40s.

Three groups of physicians in the United States have been given permission to begin tests of gene therapy on CF patients, but that approach is of little benefit to victims like Stacy Sewell, whose lungs have already been badly scarred. In such patients, lung transplants--first performed only seven years ago--are now the treatment of last resort.

One-year survival rates for lung transplant patients vary from about 50% to 75%, depending on the institution. Starnes’ one-year survival rate is nearly 80%, said Lisa Leonard, cardiothoracic transplant program coordinator at USC.

If all goes well, Starnes said, the parents would be released from the hospital in five to six days and Stacy in three weeks, hospital officials said.

Times staff writer Douglas P. Shuit contributed to this story.