By Peter Onyekachukwu 
By Peter Onyekachukwu
In a landmark medical breakthrough, surgeons at Duke University have successfully revived a “dead” heart on the operating table and transplanted it into a three-month-old baby, saving the child’s life.
Aaron Williams, one of the study’s authors, said, “It’s something that has never been done in the field of heart transplantation with success. I think this is going to be a game changer. This is going to be a technique that’s going to essentially have worldwide applicability.”
The method, called “on-table reanimation,” uses a specially made device to bring a donor heart back to life outside the donor’s body. Using an oxygenator, a centrifugal pump, and a hanging reservoir to catch expelled blood, surgeons were able to revitalise the tiny donor heart with the family’s permission.
Because current care systems that preserve organs are too large for infant hearts, the device had to be specially built. Six months after the transplant, the baby’s heart function was normal with no signs of organ rejection. Experts say the discovery may expand the pool of eligible donors by up to 30%, offering new hope to newborns in need of heart transplants.
Williams explained that the method delivers outcomes similar to existing techniques but is simpler and less expensive. He noted that it could greatly increase the number of available donor hearts worldwide by making organ preservation more accessible and boosting the use of donation after circulatory death (DCD) hearts.
DCD hearts are donated after circulatory death, when a donor’s heart and blood circulation have irreversibly stopped, unlike the traditional brain death donation.
However, critics have raised ethical concerns about reanimating hearts, including questions over declarations of death and the morality of removing a heart after life support is withdrawn.
Currently, only 0.5 per cent of paediatric heart transplants use DCD hearts, leaving many infants to die while waiting for donors.