Girl’s heart heals itself

In a first, doctors in UK remove donor heart, 10 years after transplant

Girl's heart heals itself

In a first, doctors in UK remove donor heart, 10 years after transplant

After 10 years with two hearts, Hannah Clark's faulty one did what many experts had thought impossible it healed itself enough so that doctors could remove the donated heart.

Dil Maange More: Hannah Clark is now a healthy 16-year-old with normal teenage aspirations.

But she also had a price to pay. The drugs Clark took to prevent her body from rejecting the donated heart led to malignant cancer that required chemotherapy.

Details of Clark's revolutionary transplant and follow-up care were published online yesterday in the medical journal Lancet.

Since 1994

In 1994, when Clark was eight months old, she developed severe heart failure. But Clark's heart difficulties caused problems with her lungs, meaning she also needed a lung transplant.

To avoid doing a risky heart and lung transplant, doctors decided to try something completely different.

Sir Magdi Yacoub, one of the world's top heart surgeons, said that if Clark's heart was given a time-out, it might be able to recover on its own.

So in 1995 Yacoub and others grafted a donor heart from a five-month-old directly onto Clark's own heart.

After four and a half years, both hearts were working fine.

The powerful drugs she was taking to prevent her from rejecting the donor heart then caused cancer and her body eventually rejected the donor heart.

Luckily, by that time, Clark's own heart seemed to have fully recovered. In February 2006, doctors removed Clark's donor heart.

Since then, Clark now 16 has started playing sports, gotten a part-time job, and plans to go back to school in September.

"Thanks to this operation, I've now got a normal life just like all of my friends," she said.

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