Mayo Clinic doctors use innovation to improve the lives of people with congestive heart failure and other chronic heart diseases.
The organ care system, also known as the “heart in a box,” will likely help expand the donor pool, which is crucial.
Mayo Clinic cardiologist Dr. Lisa Lomond explains how the cardiac perfusion system works: Every hour, minute and second counts as the transplant team races against time to provide organ recipients with a life-saving gift.
Innovation is improving organ transplantation. Typically, donor hearts are extracted from a person who has been declared brain dead but whose heart is still beating. Using the relatively new “heart-in-a-box” system, doctors can revive a donated heart by supplying the organ with warm, oxygenated blood.
“We now have a new technology that allows us to place donor hearts in a special device that delivers blood and controls the temperature of the heart to allow it to start beating,” Le Monde explains.
The perfusion system can preserve the donated heart for up to 12 hours. Before this technology, the donor's heart was placed on ice in a cooler to preserve it during transportation, and doctors only had about four hours to deliver the heart to the recipient.
Heart transplants are performed for patients suffering from:
- Weakened heart muscle (cardiomyopathy).
- Coronary heart disease.
- Heart valve disease.
- Congenital heart defect.