Science, Space and Technology News 2024
University of Michigan researchers have extended heart preservation times beyond 24 hours with a technique called NEHP, promising to widen the transplant window and enhance donor heart usage.More than five decades after the first human-to-human heart transplant, over 5,000 heart transplants are performed annually worldwide. However, this number falls significantly short of meeting the demand, as up to 50,000 individuals may require a transplant at any given moment.
“If translated to humans, this would be a major improvement to the six-hour-long time window in standard clinical practice,” said Dr Robert Bartlett, an emeritus professor and head of the Extracorporeal Life Support Laboratory at the University of Michigan Medical School at Ann Arbor.NEHP means that hearts, once removed from their donor, are kept in a partly physiological state at room temperature by pumping oxygenated, nutrient-rich fluid derived from bloodthrough them until transplantation.
Here, Bartlett and his colleagues kept the hearts of 30 immature and 10 juvenile pigs alive for various periods with experimental variants of NEHP. For example, the perfusate for all donor hearts was a solution of blood plasma and packed red blood cells , electrolytes, glucose, and antibiotics. The perfusate was pumped through the heart at a mean rate of 0.7 milliliters per minute per gram heart weight, and replaced every 60 minutes.
The authors monitored the health of the preserved hearts in real-time by visually checking its contractility, rhythm, color, and edema, and by measuring the concentration of lactate every hour. Each heart was maintained until it went into asystole or arrhythmia, showed minimal systolic blood pressure in the left ventricle, or showed elevated lactate concentrations for at least two hours.
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