SAME HEART SUCCEEDS IN 2 TRANSPLANTS

                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: THURSDAY, February 4, 1993                   TAG: 9302040030
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL                    PAGE: A7   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: BOSTON                                LENGTH: Short
SAME HEART SUCCEEDS IN 2 TRANSPLANTS
Surgeons worried about the shortage of hearts available for transplants have found one solution - recycling.
In today's New England Journal of Medicine, they describe an unusual case in which a heart transplant patient died a few days after his operation. Doctors took out his new heart and put it into another patient.
As a result, one heart has beat inside three different people.
Hearts are in critically short supply. In the United States, about 2,000 patients need new hearts each month, but only 100 operations are done because of the lack of hearts for transplants.
The recycling approach was tried by doctors from University Hospital Zurich in Switzerland.
The doctors acknowledged that recycling is unlikely to make much impact on the shortage, because transplant patients rarely die suddenly with still-healthy hearts.
"Nonetheless, it is interesting to note that this twice-transplanted heart functioned well in three people," they said.
The heart came from a 20-year-old man who had shot himself in the head. First, doctors implanted the heart into a 47-year-old man with a failing heart. The patient suffered a stroke five days after the operation and died a week later.
Tests showed the heart was still healthy. So the doctors asked another patient on the hospital's waiting list if he wanted it. This patient, a 58-year-old man, agreed.
A year later, the third owner of the heart "is fully active, without limitations on his daily activity," the doctors wrote.

by Archana Subramaniam by CNB