Transplanted heart transplanted again
‘Two months ago at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, California, surgeons removed a transplanted heart from a patient who had died and re-transplanted it in another recipient.
“To my knowledge, this is the first time this has been done with a transplanted heart,” Dr. Lawrence S. C. Czer, medical director of the center’s heart transplant program, told Reuters. “Even with other organs, repeat transplantation is very rare.”
The second patient was a 45-year-old man with noncompaction syndrome, a rare cardiac condition in which the heart assumes a sponge-like appearance. The disease is progressive, and the man’s heart became more and more disabled despite the best medical therapy.’
