• Question: How does the heart transplant work

    Asked by qgirach to Cristina, Michael, Gemma, Loan, Praveen on 12 Nov 2015. This question was also asked by phguan, Boonberry, BoB, Ilya Schneider.
    • Photo: Cristina Villa del Campo

      Cristina Villa del Campo answered on 12 Nov 2015:

      Hi qgirach!
      Thanks for your question!
      So I am not a cardiologist but I will do my best to explain this to you. Usually a heart transplant is performed when the patient’s heart has suffered (either because of very high hypertension of a heart attack for example) and is not able to pump the blood properly.
      First thing is to find a donor whose body is still “alive” but the brain is dead and use his/her heart.
      Then depending on the severity of the illness the surgeon can leave the patient’s heart (the person ends up having two hearts!) or remove it. They cut the hearts leaving the big arteries and a bit of the atria and they suture everything back in with the new heart. A bit like connecting pipes.
      The patient needs to have immunosuppresors because otherwise his/her immune system would attack the foreign heart.
      Then they restart the heart and check that everything is flowing well and then they close the patient.
      Hope I answered your question, let me know if you want to know more (but then I will probably need to do some reading on this!)

Comments