The World’s First Heart Transplant
As of April 1985, only two heart transplants had been performed in the Carolinas, both at Duke University Medical Center in Durham. That all changed on Jan. 6, 1986. At Charlotte Memorial Hospital (now Carolinas Medical Center) in Charlotte, Sanger Clinic physicians performed Charlotte’s first successful heart transplant. It took seven hours.
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Heart transplantation, or cardiac transplantation, is a surgical transplant procedure performed on patients with end-stage heart failure or severe coronary artery disease. The most common procedure is to take a working heart from a recently deceased organ donor (allograft) and implant it into the patient. The patient’s own heart may either be removed (orthotopic procedure) or, less commonly, left in to support the donor heart (heterotopic procedure); both are controversial solutions to one of the most enduring human ailments. Post-operation survival periods now average 15 years.
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