By Brenda Goodman, CNN
Researchers say they have been able to tap a new pool of organ donors to preserve and transplant their hearts: people whose hearts have stopped beating, resulting in so-called circulatory death.
Traditionally, the only people considered to be suitable organ donors were those who have been declared brain-dead but whose hearts and other organs have continued to function.
Read the full story in CNN.
Most transplanted hearts are from donors who are brain dead, but new research shows a different approach can be just as successful and boost the number of available organs
By LAURAN NEERGAARD
WASHINGTON — Most transplanted hearts are from donors who are brain dead, but new research shows a different approach can be just as successful and boost the number of available organs.
It’s called donation after circulatory death, a method long used to recover kidneys and other organs but not more fragile hearts. Duke Health researchers said Wednesday that using those long-shunned hearts could allow possibly thousands more patients a chance at a lifesaving transplant — expanding the number of donor hearts by 30%. Check out the full story in ABC News.
Fact checked by Erik Swain
The FDA approved the first IV ferric carboxymaltose injection for iron deficiency in adults with heart failure to improve exercise capacity, according to a press release from American Regent.
The IV iron injection (Injectafer, Daiichi Sankyo/American Regent) is approved for people with New York Heart Association class II/III HF, defined as patients with a slight or marked limitation of their physical activity due to fatigue, palpitation and/or dyspnea. Read the full article in Healio.
By Laura Williamson
Melanie Wickersheim has no memory of the first time her heart gave her trouble. She was an infant, and her pediatric myocarditis – an inflammation of the muscular walls of the heart – resolved before she was old enough to know anything had ever been wrong.
She spent the first 10 years of her life like any other kid in Los Angeles, believing she was perfectly healthy. Until suddenly, she wasn’t. She couldn’t hold down food. She felt so weak, she could barely walk. “I remember trying to walk across a parking lot. I had to stop at every light pole to take a breath, panting for air,” she said. Read the story in American Heart Association News.
Ryan Scoble thought he had the flu. He soon learned he was in heart failure and needed a transplant. Still, he hoped to return to the lacrosse field.
By Meghan Holohan
Two years ago, Ryan Scoble was playing lacrosse when he felt short of breath and fatigued. He wondered if he had the flu.
“I was struggling in warmups. I got in late in the third quarter,” the 23-year-old lacrosse long stick middie from Mercyhurst University in Erie, Pennsylvania, told TODAY’s Harry Smith. “I was struggling to make plays and even really stand up.”
Read the full story on Today.
By Caitlyn Stulpin
The incidence of myocarditis/pericarditis among veterans was low across more than 10 million doses of messenger RNA COVID-19 vaccines, given as a primary or booster dose, administered at the Veterans Health Administration, researchers found.
“We conducted this study because we were interested in estimating the incidence rate of myocarditis, pericarditis and myopericarditis following a COVID-19 mRNA vaccine across the Veterans Health Administration (VHA),” Jing Luo, MD, MPH, assistant professor of medicine at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, told Healio. Read more in Healio.
By Bob Yirka
A team of medical researchers from Montefiore Medical Center and Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York has found that mortality rates are higher for transplant patients receiving a new heart from a person infected with the SARS-CoV-2 virus than from those not infected. In their study, reported in Journal of the American College of Cardiology, the group analyzed data in the United Network for Organ Sharing (UNOS) database related to COVID-19. Read more in Medical Xpress.
By Regina Schaffer
Recent adverse events soon after receiving a left ventricular assist device, such as major organ dysfunction, have the largest effect on scores measuring health-related quality of life, according to a patient registry analysis.
In an analysis of more than 12,000 patients with end-stage HF who received an LVAD, researchers also found that patient characteristics and device implant strategies had small effects on health-related quality of life. Read more in Healio.
MADISON, Wis. – On Dec. 13, 2022, at seven-and-a-half months pregnant, Susan Siegenthaler went to an emergency department in Madison.
She was an otherwise healthy 38-year-old, but her gut told her something was wrong. She was experiencing shortness of breath, a persistent cough and significantly swollen feet.
Read more in WisBusiness.
By Jennifer Couzin-Frankel
On a chilly holiday Monday in January 2020, a medical milestone passed largely unnoticed. In a New York City operating room, surgeons gently removed the heart from a 43-year-old man who had died and shuttled it steps away to a patient in desperate need of a new one.
More than 3500 people in the United States receive a new heart each year. But this case was different—the first of its kind in the country. Read the full article in Science.