Heart Disease Prevention - What Is Cardiomyopathy?

Cardiomyopathy is a heart disease of abnormal heart muscle. Heart muscle of a patient with cardiomyopathy becomes enlarged, thick or rigid. Some patients might have their muscle tissue in the heart being replaced with scar tissue, though this is very rare. Read more at:

Heart Disease Prevention - What Is Cardiomyopathy?

What Is Piggyback Transplant for Heart Disease Patients?

Before knowing what piggyback transplant is, perhaps it is best to understand a term called cardiomyopathy.

Cardiomyopathy is a serious heart disease in which the heart muscle becomes inflamed and does not work as well as it should. In other words, the functions of the heart muscle are deteriorating. It can be caused by viral infection, heart attack, long-term and severe high blood pressure, alcoholism or other reasons that have not been identified yet. It is common in children in the first year of their life.

Simply replacing the ailing heart with a donor’s heart could not solve the problem. This is because the new heart could not adjust fast enough to handle the excess pressure built up in the lungs and it will fail.

One way the heart surgeon can do is to link the existing heart with a donor’s heart. In this so-called piggyback heart transplant, the surgeon inserts the new heart to the right side of the chest and attaches it parallel to the patient’s own heart. The 2 upper chambers on the left side of each heart must be lined up so that they could be merged.

The risks involved in such operations are similar to the traditional heart transplant, which include immune suppression problems and a chance of chronic rejection.

A British girl, who is now 16, is the world’s first heart transplant patient to recover fully after having her donor’s heart removed and functions restored to her original heart.

When she was 2 in 1995, she underwent a piggyback heart transplant and a new heart was inserted in parallel to her own failing heart. In 2006, she contracted cancer because of the immunosuppressant drugs she was taking to avoid organ rejection and the doctor removed the donor’s heart. At that time, her own heart had recovered sufficiently to work on its own. On July 14, 2009, her doctor reported in the Lancet medical journal that the girl has recovered fully from cancer since the surgery and has a normal cardiac function.

The girl’s success story certainly sparks hope for other patients with heart failure. The success indeed highlights the possibility for the patient’s own heart to make a full recovery if it is given adequate support to do so. Nevertheless, the road to recovery can never be an easy one. At one stage, the girl was forced to take 16 different medications to control her illness.

Is It Possible for a Teenager to live without a Heart for nearly 4 Months?

An American teenager of age 14 managed to survive for 118 days without a heart. She suffered from dilated cardiomyopathy, which is a condition that the patient's heart becomes weakened and enlarged and could not pump blood efficiently. This type of heart disease would require her to undertake a heart transplant for her survival.

On November 19, 2008, doctors in Miami announced that the young patient was kept alive by a custom-made artificial blood-pumping device, and they believe that this was the first time a child had survived in this manner for such a long period. In fact, an adult patient in Germany had been kept alive for 9 months without a heart.

At a news conference at the University of Miami/Jackson Memorial Medical Centre, the young girl seemed very weak and admitted that the experience was very scary. She just felt that she was like a fake person who did not really exist. Meanwhile, she was so afraid that the device might just malfunction at any moment.

Earlier on July 2, she had a heart transplant at Miami’s Holtz Children’s Hospital but the new heart failed to work properly and the doctors had to remove it quickly. Then, the doctors had to implant 2 heart pumps, made by Thoratec Corp of Pleasanton, California, to keep her blood flowing while she was fighting a host of ailments and recovering her strength. After almost 4 months, she had another heart transplant on October 29. Though she remained hospitalized, she was mobile during the period of 118 days, to be exact.

The young patient also suffered renal failure and a kidney transplant was carried out the day after the second heart transplant. Though her prognosis was good, there is a 50 percent chance that a heart transplant patient will require a new heart some 12 or 13 years after the first surgery.