The Viet Duc Friendship Hospital announced the country’s first successful simultaneous lung and heart transplant, performed on a patient with multiple organ failure.
The patient, Tran Nhu Q, was in critical condition due to severe multiple organ failure, with her risk of death increasing daily.
She was reliant on medication to sustain her life.
The 38-year-old woman was diagnosed with Eisenmenger syndrome, irreversible right ventricular failure and severe tricuspid regurgitation, resulting from an atrial septal defect that had been treated in 2011.
“The patient was indicated for a simultaneous heart and lung transplant, although there was not enough time to treat malnutrition and the donor’s lungs were infected with Acinetor baummani bacteria and were larger than the recipient’s chest,” said the hospital’s director Dr Duong Duc Hung.
Three weeks before receiving the organs from the 34-year-old brain-dead donor, doctors decided to perform a simultaneous heart and lung transplant on the woman.
The surgery on Wednesday lasted seven hours with the support of an extracorporeal circulation machine.
The surgical team reduced the size of both lungs to match and connected the two main bronchi instead of the traditional trachea to ensure better blood flow to the anastomosis.
The biggest challenge after surgery was balancing immunosuppressants.
The patient needed high doses to avoid rejection, but this increased the risk of infection from multidrug-resistant bacteria in the donor lung.
Doctors used nearly 40 drugs, combined with ultrafiltration, to treat kidney failure and titrated antibiotics to protect kidney function.
The patient was given intravenous and enteral nutrition, lung hygiene by tracheostomy, endoscopic sputum suction and rehabilitation exercises.
Currently, the patient’s heart and lung function have recovered well and continue to be closely monitored.
Deputy head of the Department of Cardiovascular and Thoracic Surgery, Assoc Prof Dr Pham Huu Lu, said heart-lung transplantation is an advanced medical technique in which the patient’s heart and lungs are simultaneously replaced with a healthy heart and lungs from a suitable donor.
This is the last resort treatment for patients with both end-stage heart and lung disease, when all other treatments have failed.
Dr Hung said the success of the simultaneous heart-lung transplant marks an important milestone, affirming the great progress of Viet Duc Friendship Hospital in the field of multiple organ transplantation, setting a milestone for Vietnamese medicine on the world map and opening up many opportunities to save lives and new treatment directions for patients with end-stage heart and lung disease. — Vietnam News/ANN
