Ken Miller has a new heart. The 58-year-old Ferndale resident was the first person in Michigan — and one of only about 70 patients in the U.S. so far — to successfully receive a “beating heart transplant,” a relatively new procedure that doctors hope will eventually widen the pool of eligible heart donors and improve outcomes for patients.
“I think it’s simply a miracle,” Miller said in a press release from Henry Ford Health, where the surgery was completed.
There are nearly 3,500 people on the waitlist for a new heart in the U.S. Some will wait for days or years, while others will die waiting for a new heart.
Any time a heart stops, or is deprived of oxygen, it gets damaged. That’s why brain-death donors have typically been the majority of heart donors, because doctors can assess the heart’s health and limit the amount of time between when it stops and when it’s transplanted. But that also severely limits the pool of eligible donors.
In the last few years, surgeons have had success with new technology that allows the heart to essentially be resuscitated after it initially stopped, and kept mechanically pumping during transport, nicknamed “Heart in a Box.” But that still required the heart to stop twice: once before donation, and once just before transplantation surgery.
Just over a year ago, doctors at Stanford University were able to keep the heart beating during transplant.
“Stopping the heart a second time, just before transplanting, induces more injury,” said Dr. Joseph Woo, professor and chair of cardiothoracic surgery, in a press release last year. “I asked, ‘Why can’t we sew it in while it is still beating?’”
The hope is that patients who receive these hearts will do better, and have fewer complications, than those who receive hearts that have been stopped more frequently or for longer periods.
“While still on the device, we placed a tube in the donor heart and connected it to the bypass machine that the recipient was already on,” said Dr. Kyle Miletic, a cardiac and transplant surgeon at Henry Ford Health.
“This tube provided the recipient’s blood to the heart the entire time we were sewing it into the patient. Because the heart was geƫting blood flow, it kept beating the whole time we performed the procedure. While this was more challenging than operating on a still, stopped heart, the heart was much stronger and more robust than we typically see after the traditional method.”
Since Miller’s surgery in May, Henry Ford Health surgeons have also done a second beating heart transplant, this time with a heart that had traveled some 2,000 miles. That patient is doing well and recovering at the hospital, according to a statement from the health system.
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