Among various organ transplants, heart transplants are second only to kidney transplants in terms of frequency of operations. It has become possible to use such operations more often in practice due to the improvement of the methods of organ conservation, the technique of cardiopulmonary bypass, and the suppression of rejection reactions with the help of modern drugs. Heart transplantation is carried out in 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 performed in 1905. At the same time, the heart vessels were connected to the ends of the jugular vein and carotid artery. Subsequently, a heart transplant was also used in the pleural region, on the thigh, and so on. In 1941 N. P. Sinitsyn performed the world's first transplant of an additional heart into a frog. And in 1961, the technique of orthotopic transplantation was developed. The heart was removed at the level of the atria, and then toThe left atrial walls and the interatrial septum were sutured to the donor heart, after which the roots of the aorta of the donor heart and pulmonary artery were anastomosed (connected) to the vascular trunks.
First clinical heart transplant
In 1964, a heart surgeon from America named James Hardy transplanted a monkey heart into a man who was dying of a myocardial infarction. However, the organ stopped working after 90 minutes. And in 1967, another doctor performed the first clinical allotransplantation of the heart (human-to-human transplantation), but the patient died 17 days later. After that, doctors of foreign clinics began to massively carry out such transplants, but the results were often unsatisfactory. Therefore, heart transplantation soon became less and less common. It was also connected with moral and ethical aspects. The most successful heart transplant was performed at the clinic at Stanford University (USA). Currently, this and other large clinics continue to intensively study various nuances of heart transplantation, including searching for methods to maintain the viability of an organ that has already stopped and restore its contractile function. Research is also underway to create 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 almost non-existent.was produced. But after the invention in 1980 of the drug "Cyclosporin", which prevents the rejection of a transplanted organ, heart transplantation became widely used in domestic medicine. So, the first successful transplantation was performed by the surgeon V. Shumakov in 1987. Now science has gone far ahead, and the operation, which was fantastic for that time, has become commonplace today. Not so long ago, a heart transplant required stopping it and connecting it to artificial circulation, and now the whole process is carried out with a beating heart.
