What is a Heart Transplant?
| In medicine, keeping the heart beating is
top priority. But it is not always easy. The heart has many enemies. They
are without and within the body. Diseases such as viruses can invade and
destroy heart tissue. The muscle can weaken with age. The heart's built-in
timer can misfire. What can modern medicine do about a broken heart?
Mend it- sometimes. When a heart is not functioning well by itself it may need to be replaced by another heart. In the past people where trying artificial hearts but the patient would die in a matter of days or weeks because the bodies reject it. So people have tried putting animals hearts like on the History Page there is a story about a baby that had a bad heart and had a heart transplant and got a baboons heart. Recently, they have found that the best thing to do when performing a heart transplant you should use a heart of a person that has died. When a person dies and he/she are willing to donate their heart than the doctors must quickly find a person to donate a heart to. This task is not that hard because more than a thousand people are waiting on a list to receive one. Since there are so many people the doctors look first at the ones in need the most and then the ones nearer to where the surgery is going to take place. But if someone in a very bad need of a heart transplant is in a other state the surgeons and doctors might quickly take the heart out of the dead person while the living patient is having their heart out and the heart needed is flown to the ones in need. But this whole process needs to be done quickly for the the heart can last only about 24 hours when in the frozen. |
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