where was the first successful heart transplant performed
Where was the first successful heart transplant performed?
Hint – it was the heart of a frog & didnt happen in South Africa
According to Edmunds Jr LH in “The Annals of Thoracic Surgery”, the birth of cardiac transplantation can be traced back to the innovative French surgeon Alexis Carrel who performed the first heterotopic canine heart transplant with Charles Guthrie in 1905.
Alexis Carrel was a French surgeon and Nobel laureate whose experiments involved sustaining life in animal organs outside the body. He received the 1912 Nobel Prize in Medicine or Physiology for his technique for suturing blood vessels. In the 1930s, he collaborated with the aviator Charles Lindbergh to invent a mechanical heart that circulated vital fluids through excised organs. Various organs and animal tissues were kept alive for many years in this fashion.
In 1925, the concept of cardiac allograft rejection was proposed by Frank Mann at the Mayo Clinic to explain the eventual failure of heterotopic canine allografts. He described the rejection process as a “biologic incompatibility between donor and recipient” manifested by an impressive leukocytic infiltration of the rejecting myocardium.
In 1946, Vladimir Demikhov of the Soviet Union successfully implanted the first intrathoracic heterotopic heart allograft. He later demonstrated that heart-lung and isolated lung transplantation were also technically feasible. The use of moderate hypothermia, cardiopulmonary bypass, and an atrial “cuff” anastomotic technique permitted Norman Shumway and Richard Lower at Stanford University to surmount the formidable barriers of orthotopic heart transplantation using the canine model in 1960.
The first human cardiac transplant was a chimpanzee xenograft performed at the University of Mississippi by James Hardy in 1964. Although the procedure using Shumway’s technique was technically satisfactory, the primate heart was unable to maintain the recipient’s circulatory load and the patient succumbed several hours postoperatively.
The first human-to-human heart transplant was December 3rd, 1967, in South Africa. Heart surgeon Dr. Christian Neethling Barnard performed the first human heart transplant at Groote Schur Hospital in Capetown. This was shortly after touring the United States and observing Dr. Norman Schumway’s nine year study with animal heart transplantation and rejection methods.
Heart Transplantation by CARE Hospitals – Cardiac Transplantation performed by CARE Hospitals INDIA