human body pig heart ! This is actually happening in reality. Recently, two transplant surgeries in the United States have attracted worldwide attention. Pig hearts were transplanted into human bodies, which is amazing! Why do scientists do this?
In fact, this is not the first time something similar has happened. At the beginning of this year, David Bennett from the United States became the first person in the world to transplant a pig heart. This old man is 57 years old and suffers from severe heart disease. He was unable to get out of bed for 6 consecutive weeks. He only relied on extracorporeal membrane oxygenation to survive and was dying.
Since there was no suitable heart for transplantation and his physical condition could not survive, he and his family had no choice but to take a gamble and adopted another bold plan proposed by the doctor, which was to transplant a pig's heart.
Three days after the operation, Bennett recovered well and was able to walk after 9 days. At that time, American scientists were very excited and thought the operation was very successful. Surprisingly, however, Bennett passed away 2 months later.
According to a recent paper, the cause of Bennett's death was inseparable from the pig heart. When he died, his heart had grown from 328 grams to 600 grams, and fibrotic tissue had appeared, accompanied by red blood cell extravasation. human herpes virus and porcine cytomegalovirus were found in his body. In short, this transplant operation cannot be said to be successful. After extending his life for 2 months, the patient still died due to technical problems.
However, American scientists did not give up, but persisted in making the same attempt. After Bennett's death, they "kept up their efforts" and performed two more pig heart transplants. This time they were much more cautious and selected two brain-dead patients for surgery.
The first patient is Lawrence Kelly, a 72-year-old Navy veteran who was brain-dead due to a car accident. His fiancée donated his body for research by a team at NYU Langone Hospital, which implanted a pig's heart into Kelly in June.
A month later, they repeated the procedure on another brain-dead patient. The patient, 64 years old, named Alva Capuano, became the third person in history to have a pig heart implanted.
They did not live with the pig heart, but were removed from the ventilator after 72 hours. Why is
like this? According to the researchers, although the body was donated, it will eventually be returned to the family of the deceased for burial, so it cannot be kept for too long; moreover, 3 days can basically meet their needs for understanding, although a longer time The experiment will yield more gains, but current conditions do not allow it; in addition, existing funding and other objective factors do not support longer observations.
For these two new experimental subjects, the results obtained by the researchers are relatively satisfactory for the time being. They saw no early rejection in the patients and no detection of porcine cytomegalovirus, which is good news for the researchers.
The fundamental reason why American scientists insist on making such attempts is the shortage of organs. In our country, about 300,000 people need transplants every year, but there are less than 10,000 organ donors every year. There is a huge gap between the two! The same is true in the United States. According to a surgeon in that country named Bartley Griffith, 17 people in the United States die every day while waiting for organ donors, and there are still 100,000 people waiting for organ donors.
Although more and more people have donated organs in recent years due to relevant appeals and popular science work, the number of people waiting to be transplanted has also continued to soar, and donated organs are always in short supply, both abroad and at home. it's the same.
If we just wait, many people will not necessarily die while waiting for organ donation. The ideal of oversupply of human donated organs is still out of reach, so we can only think of other ways. Although there have been experiments such as so-called 3D printed organs or mechanical hearts, these technologies are not widely used, and using off-the-shelf organs is still the best option.
Of all animals, the pig's heart is the most suitable, about the same size as a human heart, and relatively easy to grow.
Of course, scientists don’t just pull in a pig and remove the heart for transplantation. These pigs are individually cultured and are born to donate their hearts. In addition, the transplanted heart will also undergo gene editing to knock out specific DNA and other methods to reduce the rejection reaction between the heart and the human body before the transplant operation can be performed.
Even so, Bennett unfortunately passed away, which shows that there are still many problems that humans do not understand about pig heart transplantation. More experiments are needed to help them find the problem, so another transplant operation is needed. The scientists who conducted this study pointed out that these people who can donate their bodies for experiments are heroes.
Some people worry that if a pig heart is transplanted into a human body, will it turn into a pig? This concern is exaggerated, but it is not unreasonable. Previous research reports pointed out that human-to-human heart transplantation may cause drastic changes in the temperament of the transplanted person. More research is needed on whether human personality will change after implanting a pig heart.
In addition to hearts, pig kidneys have also been transplanted into humans. In October 2021, doctors at NYU Langone Hospital connected a pig’s kidney to a brain-dead patient. For up to 54 hours, the pig kidneys not only showed no rejection, but also reduced creatinine levels. After achieving satisfactory results, the doctors removed the patient's ventilator.
In any case, if such an experiment can eventually succeed, it will naturally be a good thing for the benefit of all mankind. Countless people will be saved every year because of this technology. #American doctors successfully transplanted pig hearts into brain-dead patients#
