The Gregorio Marañón General University Hospital released little Mariami, a seven-month-old girl who was the first baby in Spain to receive a partial heart transplant and the first in Europe under one year old.
SO … The Government of the Community of Madrid announced this Saturday in a press release in which it highlighted that the little girl had presented a “favorable development at any time”but he had to be hospitalized for several weeks after leaving the intensive care unit, where he only had to stay for two days.
Partial heart transplantation is an innovative technique launched in 2022 by Dr. Joseph Turek and his team at the American Duke University Hospital. The strategy involves transplanting only part of the heart.in particular the aortic and/or pulmonary valveto children who require this type of surgery, but who do not have global organ failure.
Currently, these pediatric patients receive valve implants made with materials that do not grow with the body, forcing them to undergo several operations throughout their lives to replace them and, according to the Madrid executive, “with this innovative procedure this is avoided, because they grow with the patient.”
The case of Mariami is “of particular complexity”, since which required the combination of two other techniques in which the Gregorio Marañón Hospital has also been a “pioneer” center in the field of pediatric heart transplantation: when the donor and recipient have incompatible blood groups, as well as donation in controlled asystole.
A triple step
Mariami was already a patient at the hospital before her birth. He was diagnosed with heart disease when he was still a fetus. Her mother followed her pregnancy in this center. Newly arrived in the world, they had to insert a ductal stent, a non-surgical treatment to keep her stable. But what the little girl needed was a new pulmonary valve. Doctors had a margin of 6 to 10 months to perform either a partial transplant or conventional surgery. And in this interval, a donor appeared.
“Maramimi has therefore become a triple step in children’s heart surgery: a partial heart transplant, with blood incompatibility and a donation in asystole,” detailed the government of Isabel Díaz Ayuso, indicating that this new advance from the Gregorio Marañón Hospital will benefit minors with congenital malformations in which the heart valves have not formed “correctly, leading to serious dysfunctions”.
After pointing out that in Spain around de 4,000 children each year with this type of problem In the context of health, the regional administration affirmed that this new technique will also allow “greater use” of heart donations from children, which are “very limited”. “Taking into account that children who require a conventional total transplant will always have priority, this strategy opens up three new scenarios,” he added, while explaining that “in each of them, one or two children can benefit from the partial transplant depending on the valves to be replaced”.
The first case is where a healthy heart is donated, but at that time there is no recipient of adequate size; the second, when the donor organ does not have good cardiac function, its muscle does not work well, but its valves do and the third This is called a domino transplant. and this occurs when a minor requires a complete procedure, but the valves are functional and these can be used for one or two partials and, as in the rest of the cases, benefit one or two recipients.
“It is important to remember that this new technique, as a process linked to a transplant, It is made possible thanks to the generosity of the donor. and the family, a fundamental solidarity to articulate the entire system”, resolved the Regional Executive.
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