Third Artificial Heart Implant ‘Couldn’t Have Gone Better’
A “desperately ill” man became the world’s third recipient of a self-contained mechanical heart after a six-hour operation.
The procedure Wednesday at St. Luke’s Episcopal Hospital in Houston follows the success of two implants of the AbioCor device at Jewish Hospital in Louisville, Ky.
“The procedure . . . went as expected, and the patient is resting comfortably,” the hospital said in a statement Thursday.
“It couldn’t have gone better,” Dr. O. H. Frazier, who spent more than a decade helping to develop the AbioCor replacement heart at the hospital’s Texas Heart Institute, told the Houston Chronicle. “Everything looks stable now. He’s not having any problems.”
He told the newspaper that the man had been “desperately ill for a long time” with heart failure and was not a candidate for a transplant because of complications involving his lungs.
If the lung problem improves, doctors will reassess the possibility of a heart transplant, he said.
The hospital did not identify the patient.
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