A 65 year old man with end-stage cardiomyopathy and severe hypertension desperately needed a heart. After September 11, 2001, Castelio Campos received news that one of the victims of 9/11 had a heart that was a match for him.  He eagerly arrived and the hospital, was anesthetized, and then awoke before the surgery had been completed.  The nurses informed him that unfortunately, the heart was not a perfect match.  Mr. Campos was also told that he would have to wait in the hospital until they found a heart for him.  After a few months, he was highly ischemic and had advanced pulmonary hypertension, so surgeons at the University of Miami strove to find a way to help him.
The surgeons decided to preform a heterotopic heart transplant in which they left his native (N) heart in and went forward with the transplant of a not-so-perfect donor heart. They placed the allopathic donor heart (D) right next to his native heart (as shown in the two figures below). As can be seen on the EKG below, this patient is living with two QRS complexes on different axes.  Thanks to Mr. Campos’ successful surgery, there are now about 100 people in the world living with two hearts.

In the figure above, visual A shows the patient’s EKG results and differing QRS complexes can be viewed by at the arrows D (donor heart) and N (native heart). Visual B shows a front view of the patient in which a cardiac defibrillator is treating the native heart. Visual C shows the top view and demonstrates the close proximity of the two hearts and the amount of space they occupy in the chest cavity.

Information obtained from the American Heart Association and the New England Journal of Medicine.

-Amy

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 4th, 2007 at 8:35 am and is filed under Cardiovascular Engineering. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.