Battling Heart and Stroke

In the recent issue of the New England Journal of Medicine, several articles discuss different aspects of heart transplantation. One interesting aspect is about reversing the irreversible - donating hearts after cardiac death.

It used to be that organ donation can only occur after cardiac death, e.g. after a donor’s heart has completely stopped. Organs such as kidneys can then be transplanted from the donor to the recipient. However, this posed a challenge for heart transplant since the donor’s heart is dead and has irreversibly stopped, and is therefore not viable for transplantation anymore.

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Two artificial heart valves get top billing in the New England Journal of Medicine this week. Two video clips of two artificial heart valves can be viewed in the journal’s website. What is so special about these two valves is that they were implanted 38 years ago in a Canadian woman who is now 67 years old. And they are still working well - and going strong.

The Starr-Edwards artificial valve was developed by the surgeon Albert Starr and the retired engineer Miles Lowell Edwards. The first one was implanted in a heart patient in 1960. Since then, over a quarter of a million heart patients got the implants. More →