The National Taiwan University Hospital (NTUH) tops all hospitals in Asia in the number of heart transplants performed since the first operation of its kind in 1967 in South Africa, the hospital said yesterday, as it celebrated its 500th heart transplant patient being discharged.
NTUH Division of Cardiovascular Surgery professor and head of the hospital’s heart transplant team Wang Shoei-shen (王水深) said that as of yesterday, the hospital had performed 504 human heart transplants, followed by South Korea’s Asan Medical Center, which had done fewer than 500.
“The [Taiwan] hospital’s 500th heart transplant case is a 58-year-old man, surnamed Chiang (江), who suffered a myocardial infarction [heart attack] on a family trip to Taitung County on Feb. 6 this year,” Wang told a press conference in Taipei yesterday.
Photo: Liu Hsin-de, Taipei Times
Chiang was rushed to the Mackay Memorial Hospital’s Taitung Branch, where he underwent balloon angioplasty, an invasive method of reopening blocked coronary arteries, and received an intravascular stent, Wang said.
Wang said that as Chiang’s condition remained unstable, he was transferred to the NTUH on Feb. 20, before his deteriorating health required the installation of a life-sustaining extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO) machine on March 7 and a ventricular assist device (VAD) on March 10.
The 58-year-old also underwent below-knee amputations of both legs on March 20 due to poor blood circulation in the lower limbs, Wang said, adding that the patient waited for more than three months for a new heart and had the transplant on June 22.
Looking back, Wang said the NTUH had achieved many milestones in heart transplant surgery since it gave new life to the nation’s first-ever heart transplant patient in 1987.
Those included a 1998 surgery in which the heart recipient was a seven-year-old girl who had a mirrored position of internal organs (where organs are in the reverse of their normal positions); a 2005 case in which the patient underwent a successful heart transplant after being administered CPR for more than four hours; two 2006 cases in which the recipients gave birth to healthy babies years after their heart surgeries; and a 2008 case in which the patient survived for 16 days without a heart, during which he was connected to two ECMO machines, Wang said.
Turning to the nation’s conservative attitude toward heart donation, Wang said that the number of organ donors increased noticeably following the decision by the family of Tseng Yu-tzu (曾御慈) — a NTUH trauma surgeon who was killed in a drunk driving accident in May last year — to donate all of her usable organs.
“However, the number is on the decline again as people’s memories of the incident fade,” Wang said.
Wang said there are more than 180 patients waiting for a heart transplant at the NTUH, but only 85 hearts are donated, on average, per year.
“Many of my patients passed away while waiting for a new heart,” Wang said, urging the public to adopt a more open-minded approach to organ donation, to give critically-ill patients a second chance at life.
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