Among the transplants of various organs, in terms of the frequency of operations, a heart transplant is second only to a kidney transplant. The use of such operations more often in practice has become possible thanks to improved methods of preserving organs, cardiopulmonary bypass, and suppressing the rejection reaction using modern drugs. Heart transplantation is performed at the thermal stage of chronic coronary heart disease, cardiomyopathy with severe heart failure, severe combined heart defects.
First experiments
The first heart transplant on a dog’s neck was made in 1905. In this case, the heart vessels were connected with the ends of the jugular vein and carotid artery. Subsequently, a heart transplant was also applied to the pleural region, to the thigh, and so on. In 1941, N.P. Sinitsyn performed the world's first transplant of an extra heart to a frog. And in 1961, an orthotopic transplant technique was developed. The heart was removed at the level of the atria, and then the donor heart was sutured to the left walls of the atria and the atrial septum, after which the aortic roots of the donor heart and pulmonary artery were anastomosed (connected) with the vascular trunks.
The first clinical heart transplant
In 1964, a man who was dying of a myocardial infarction, a heart surgeon from America named James Hardy transplanted the heart of a monkey. However, the organ stopped working after 90 minutes. And in 1967, another doctor performed the first clinical allotransplantation of a heart (transplant from person to person), but the patient died 17 days later. After that, doctors at foreign clinics began to massively carry out such transplants, but the results were often unsatisfactory. Therefore, soon heart transplantation began to be carried out less and less. It was also connected with moral and ethical aspects. The most successful heart transplant was performed at a clinic at Stanford University (USA). At present, in this and other large clinics they continue to intensively study the various nuances of heart transplantation, including the search for methods to maintain the viability of an organ that has already stopped and to restore its contractile function. Research is also being done in the field of creating an artificial heart.
Heart transplant in Russia
Due to the frequent rejection in our country until the eighties of the last century, heart transplantation was practically not performed. But after the invention of the drug Cyclosporin in 1980, which prevents rejection of a transplanted organ, heart transplantation has become quite widely used in domestic medicine. So, the first successful transplantation was performed by surgeon V. Shumakov in 1987. Now science has gone far ahead, and the operation, fantastic for that time, has become commonplace today. Not so long ago, a heart transplant required it to be stopped and connected to cardiopulmonary bypass, and now the whole process is carried out with a beating heart.