LONDON — British doctors designed a radical solution to save an infant girl with major heart problems in 1995: they implanted a donor heart from another baby directly onto her own failing heart.
After 10 years with two blood-pumping organs, Hannah Clark’s faulty one did what many experts had thought impossible: It healed itself enough so that doctors could remove the donated heart.
But she also had a price to pay: the drugs Hannah took to prevent her body from rejecting the donated heart led to cancer that required chemotherapy. The chemotherapy in turn led her body to reject the donor heart. But by then, her own heart seemed to have fully recovered.
Details of Hannah’s revolutionary transplant and follow-up care were published online today in the medical journal The Lancet.
“This shows that the heart can indeed repair itself if given the opportunity,” said Dr. Doug las Zipes, a past president of the American College of Cardiology. Zipes was not linked to Hannah’s treatment or to the Lancet paper.
“The heart apparently has major regenerative powers, and it is now key to find out how they work,” Zipes said.
Since the donor heart was removed in 2006, Hannah — now 16 — has started playing sports, has 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,” said Hannah, who lives near Cardiff.
Her parents marveled at her recovery and said that at one point during Hannah’s illness, they were told she would be dead within 12 hours.
