Covid-19 Patient Gets Double Lung Transplant, Offering Hope for Others

Wow!

Here's a non-paywall link for Northwestern's press release.

https://www.nm.org/about-us/no...orthwestern-medicine

I was aware of one in Hubei earlier in the year.

That picture of the old lungs was shocking.

I am very happy that the patient gets a new lease on life, and very much hope that the medical establishment can learn something valuable from this that will subsequently benefit other patients.

A second patient got a double lung transplant at NU. Guy is in his early 60s, had no health issues before COVID. "I thought the virus was a hoax."

quote:

"Usually we do these lung transplants in six to eight hours and we were taking more than this, around ten hours, so that I think reveals how difficult the dissection was with all of the scarring and damage from the virus," said Dr. Rafael Garza Castillon, thoracic surgeon.

https://abc7chicago.com/health...are-stories/6342224/

Of course, this means that patients who need a double lung transplant for other reasons are more likely to die due to the extra demand for organs that are in extremely limited supply ...

quote:

Originally posted by Piano*Dad:
Of course, this means that patients who need a double lung transplant for other reasons are more likely to die due to the extra demand for organs that are in extremely limited supply ...

Well THAT would be horrid.

But it's obviously true unless there are lots of excellent lungs being thrown away because no one needs them. That is not the case.

If you're effectively triaging patients, and a COVID patient pops up who needs lungs, lungs that were about to go to someone else, then that someone else has just been handed a higher probability of death because they have to go back into the queue. And everyone else in the queue is pushed further back, leading to greater death and morbidity.

quote:

Originally posted by Piano*Dad:
Of course, this means that patients who need a double lung transplant for other reasons are more likely to die due to the extra demand for organs that are in extremely limited supply ...

Are the organs in limited supply?

Lots of people die and donate organs, and yet there are comparatively fewer lung transplants. I would have thought the bottleneck is the number of people who are capable of performing the procedure.

quote:

Are the organs in limited supply?

Ask Jon ...

quote:

Originally posted by Piano*Dad:

quote:

Are the organs in limited supply?

Ask Jon ...

Fair point. I guess I don't understand why there are so many, let's say, kidney transplants in comparison.

Won’t the organ donation protocol handle this? It shouldn’t matter how someone got sick. If they are sicker than someone else and have a good chance of survival, why shouldn’t a corona patient not get the available organ?

quote:

Originally posted by QuirtEvans:

quote:

Originally posted by Piano*Dad:

quote:

Are the organs in limited supply?

Ask Jon ...

Fair point. I guess I don't understand why there are so many, let's say, kidney transplants in comparison.

Because nobody has to die so that transplantation can happen.

My fitness trainer has one child, 6. Recently learned child’s kidneys are failing. Trainer is going to give her daughter a kidney.

That's a reasonable point. You can't live without a heart, though (although each lung organ donor can donate two lungs, is a single lung transplant a common thing? I don't know anywhere near as much as I should about this stuff.).

Is the number of potential organ donors really fewer than 10,000, or is there a much larger donor pool, but the organs aren't healthy enough to use? Or is it that matches are that difficult to find, so many organs go unused?

So, a little Googling, and here's part of the answer:

quote:

In 2018, 17,500 donors brought new life to recipients and their families.

https://www.donatelife.net/sta...0donated%20in%20time.

I couldn't tell whether that number included living donations. I am surprised the number of donors isn't larger. Just car crashes ... that's 38,000 deaths per year. But some percentage aren't donors, and maybe another group is composed of those whose organs suffer too much damage. And then there's this statistic:

quote:

8,000 deaths occur every year in the U.S. because organs are not donated in time.

Yeah, it’s complicated. And some communities won’t participate due to lack of trust or religion.