ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1997, Roanoke Times
DATE: Friday, January 17, 1997 TAG: 9701170090
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: B-4 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: MIAMI
SOURCE: Associated Press
A baby girl believed to have been the youngest heart transplant recipient in the nation died Thursday, nine weeks and four days after surgeons gave her a new heart when she was barely 90 minutes old.
Cheyenne Pyle died at 2:10 p.m. at Jackson Children's Hospital, where she was born Nov. 10, hospital officials said.
``She never left the newborn intensive care unit,'' hospital spokesman Omar Montejo said.
The daughter of Stephen and Alberta Pyle of Fort Lauderdale was born with a defective heart. After the five-hour transplant operation - performed by 35 people in three surgical teams - she was given an 80 percent chance of surviving.
But the little girl began to deteriorate late Wednesday after developing a chemical imbalance in her blood, said Dr. Lee Ann Pearse, the hospital's director of the pediatric cardiac transplant program.
The imbalance caused Cheyenne's heart to beat too slowly, which in turn lowered her blood pressure, Pearse said.
Doctors used drugs and a pacemaker to try to control her heartbeat. She did not respond.
At birth, Cheyenne weighed 7 pounds, 9 ounces and had a congenital condition, hypoplastic left heart syndrome, which affects about 150,000 children a year in the United States. Left untreated, an artery closes and cuts the blood supply to the body within a day or so.
The only options open to Cheyenne's parents were a transplant, a three-operation procedure ending at age 2, or certain death.
Cheyenne's condition was detected with an ultrasound after her mother went into premature labor when she was 35 weeks' pregnant. The defect was confirmed with a fetal echocardiogram.
LENGTH: Short : 43 lines KEYWORDS: FATALITYby CNB