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First Heart Transplant

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FIRST HEART TRANSPLANT Rodriguez 1
First Heart Transplant
Dinora Rodriguez
Mrs. Williams – ECRD 1211
Medical Assistant Program
Houston Community College – Coleman
FIRST HEART TRANSPLANT Rodriguez 2
First Heart Transplant
Dinora Rodriguez
Medical Assistant Program
Houston Community College – Coleman
"For a dying person, a transplant is not a difficult decision. If a lion chases you to a river filled with crocodiles, you will leap into the water convinced you have a chance to swim to the other side. But you would never accept such odds if there were no lion." A heart transplant is a surgery that removes a diseased heart and is replaced with a functioning heart of a person that has recently died. Since this procedure is very time consuming and …show more content…

However, many patients were dying soon after the surgeries which caused the number of heart transplants to drastically drop from 100 in 1968 to only 18 in 1970. It became evident that the patient’s bodies were naturally rejecting the new foreign tissue. In the following years, advances in studying types of tissues and immunosuppressant drugs caused for more heart transplants and an increase in the rate of patient survival. In the mid 1970’s, Jean Borel discovered cyclosporine, “an immunosuppressant drug derived from soil fungus.” In 1983, Columbia University Medical Center had a small group of medical centers start clinical trials of cyclosporine. This trial was approved in November of that same year for commercial use and now it is the most common immunosuppressant prescribed for organ transplantation.
Research on heart transplants and immunosuppressants continue to this day. The amount of hearts available and the number of patients in need of a heart are greatly outnumbered. New devices have also been invented to help patient’s during their wait for a new heart. Nevertheless, research continues to expand in finding “the success of heart transplantation in our treatment of end-stage cardiac

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