Rare Piggyback Surgery Leaves Man With Two Beating Hearts

A 56 year-old Indian patient was left with two hearts after a transplant surgery. The surgery is called “piggyback” operation.

While performing a transplant surgery, doctors realized that the donor organ was too small for the 56 year-old patient. The heart was donated from a brain-dead teenager.

Recent Advancements in Cardiac Surgery
Cardiac surgery is a formidable field in treating congenital heart diseases, valve replacements, atrial fibrillation, and coronary heart disease.

‘Piggyback transplant is when the patient's diseased heart is left in place while the donor's heart is added giving the person two hearts.’

Tweet it Now

Cardiothoracic surgeon A Gopala Krishna Gokhale connected the healthy heart to the old failing organ during a seven-hour operation at Apollo Hospital in Hyderabad.

His normal second heart, which is fist-sized, now sits between the right lung and the original heart, described as “the size of a small football”.

“Two hearts in the patient complement each other to facilitate circulation, but beat at different rates,” said Dr Gokhale.

A Second Chance at Life: Tissue and Organ Transplantation
Organ and tissue transplantation can give a second chance at life to thousands of people. Learn more about this interesting procedure.

The patient’s blood pressure returned to near-normal levels after the operation but he now has two pulses and a complex electrocardiogram pattern.

Piggyback Heart Transplant

The Future of Heart Transplants in India
Dr. K.M. Cherian who pioneered the first Heart transplant in India talks to Medindia of heart transplants in India, the challenges in cadaver transplant and India’s booming medical Tourism.

Piggyback transplant or the heterotopic heart transplant is a rare procedure where the recipient’s diseased heart is left in place to support the donor heart.

Sometimes, during a heart transplant, simply replacing the ailing heart with a donor’s heart may not ensure normal functioning of the heart. This is because the new heart could not adjust fast enough to handle the excess pressure built up in the lungs and it may fail.

Heart Transplant Paradox: Long Waiting List but Declining Donor Heart Acceptance by Hospitals
A new study indicates that the acceptance of donor hearts has declined from 44% to 29% in 10 years, despite the increase in heart transplant waiting list and more patients dying on the list.

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.

Worldwide only about 150 such procedures have ever been reported.

Piggyback heart transplants were pioneered by Christiaan Barnard in South Africa in the 1970s and the average survival for the procedure is ten years.

Source-Medindia