An American teen-ager survived for nearly four
months without a heart, kept alive by a custom-built artificial blood-pumping
device, until she was able to have a heart transplant, doctors in Miami said on
Wednesday.
The doctors said they knew of another case in which an adult had been
kept alive in Germany for nine months without a heart but said they believed
this was the first time a child had survived in this manner for so long.
The patient, D'Zhana Simmons of South Carolina, said the experience of
living for so long with a machine pumping her blood was "scary."
"You never knew when it would malfunction," she said, her voice barely
above a whisper, at a news conference at the University of Miami/Jackson
Memorial Medical Center.
"It was like I was a fake person, like I didn't really exist. I was just
here," she said of living without a heart.
Simmons, 14, suffered from dilated cardiomyopathy, a condition in which
the patient's heart becomes weakened and enlarged and does not pump blood
efficiently.
She had a heart transplant on July 2 at Miami's Holtz Children's Hospital
but the new heart failed to function properly and was quickly removed.
Two heart pumps made by Thoratec Corp of Pleasanton, California, were
implanted to keep her blood flowing while she fought a host of ailments and
recovered her strength. Doctors implanted another heart on Oct. 29.
"She essentially lived for 118 days without a heart, with her circulation
supported only by the two blood pumps," said Dr. Marco Ricci, the hospital's
director of pediatric cardiac surgery. During that time, Simmons was mobile but
remained hospitalized.
When an artificial heart is used to sustain a patient, the patient's own
heart is usually left in the body, doctors said.
In some cases, adult patients have been kept alive that way for more than
a year, they said.
"This, we believe, is the first pediatric patient who has received such a
device in this configuration without the heart, and possibly one of the youngest
that has ... been bridged to transplantation without her native heart," Ricci
said.
Simmons also suffered renal failure and had a kidney transplant the day
after the second heart transplant.
Ricci said her prognosis was good. But doctors said there is a 50 percent
chance that a heart transplant patient will need a new heart 12 or 13 years
after the first surgery.
(Editing by Cynthia Osterman) Keywords: USA TRANSPLANT/
(jim.loney@reuters.com; +1 305 810 2688; Reuters Messaging:
jim.loney.reuters.com@reuters.net)
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