A team at Durham, N.C.-based Duke Health successfully developed and performed the world’s first on-table heart reanimation for a 3-month-old patient earlier this year.
The new technique enables surgeons to temporarily reanimate a donor heart outside of the body with the use of an extracorporeal membrane oxygenation machine. The process opens access for infant patients to receive hearts donated after circulatory death, according to a July 16 news release from the health system.
Details of the procedure were published July 16 in The New England Journal of Medicine.
Duke Health surgeons performed the U.S.’s first adult donation after circulatory death heart transplant in 2019 and the first adolescent donation after circulatory death heart transplant in 2021.
“This innovation was born out of necessity,” Joseph Turek, MD, PhD, chief of pediatric cardiac surgery at Duke Health and lead study author, said in the release. “We were determined to find a way to help the smallest and sickest children who previously had no access to DCD heart donation.”
Read more about the procedure here.
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