How Soon is Too Soon to Donate Your Heart?

Organ transplantation must abide by the so-called dead-donor rule: a person has to be declared dead before any vital organs can be removed. Yet organs have to be alive if there is any hope of successful transfer to a recipient. Medical professionals have handled this paradoxical situation — finding a dead body with live organs — by fashioning a category of people with beating hearts who are said to be brain-dead, usually after a traumatic head injury, and who are considered just as dead as if they had rigor mortis. …

Take My Heart

Another option [is] still controversial… Amanda would be taken, technically alive, to an operating room, where her breathing tube would be removed. If her breathing ceased naturally and her heart stopped quickly (within an hour), she would be moved to an adjacent operating room and Kleinman would count off precisely five minutes, during which time Amanda would be prepped for surgery with antiseptics and surgical drapes, while Kleinman carefully watched for signs of a returning heartbeat. If there were none, Amanda would be declared legally dead; the stoppage would then be considered “irreversible.” Before her organs were seriously damaged by the lack of oxygen (every minute counts), the surgeons would rapidly open Amanda’s torso and remove them for transplant.

Full article on a new approach to organ donation.

Print