Heart Transplants

In an unprecedented feat, British surgeons implanted a donor heart in a dying toddler whose own heart was too weak to sustain life, then removed it 10 years later after the girl's own heart had fully recovered. The technique is unlikely to become widespread because of the severe shortage of pediatric donor hearts, but it suggests that better mechanical assist devices that take some or all of the load off a diseased heart could allow time for weakened hearts to heal themselves.

Heart transplant patients are as much as 25% more likely to survive if the sex of the donor is the same as the patient's, researchers said Wednesday. The results surprised experts because, for most types of transplants, sex differences are irrelevant as long as a good immunocompatability is achieved.

Dr. Adrian Kantrowitz, the pioneering cardiovascular surgeon who performed the first U.S. heart transplant, developed a balloon-pumping device that has saved hundreds of thousands of lives and developed mechanical heart-assist devices, died of heart failure Friday in Ann Arbor, Mich. He was 90.

Federal regulators have delayed pulling Medicare funding from two small heart transplant programs, stepping back from a move that they had said was meant to signal a crackdown on centers that didn't meet their standards. The U.S. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services said Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center in Winston-Salem, N.C., and Montefiore Medical Center in New York were submitting corrective plans, which the agency needed to review.

The federal government has notified four more heart transplant programs, including one in California, that their federal funding may be pulled because they performed too few transplants in recent years to remain proficient. Slated to lose their Medicare certification in 30 days are programs at Sutter Memorial Hospital in Sacramento, Hartford Hospital in Connecticut, Washington Hospital Center in Washington, D.C., and BryanLGH Medical Center East in Lincoln, Neb.

UC San Diego Medical Center announced Friday that it was voluntarily shutting its heart transplant program -- at least temporarily -- amid a federal review of transplant centers that fall below performance standards. "It is a very difficult decision for all of us here," said Alexander Aussi, the hospital's transplant administrator. UC San Diego's heart program, which opened in 1990, performed just four transplants last year, down from 10 the year before.

"A Stranger's Heart": Hallmark Channel, May 5, at 9 p.m. The premise: Suffering from severe heart failure, Callie Morgan (Samantha Mathis) is admitted to the transplant unit at University Central Hospital in Los Angeles, where she awaits a new heart. Another patient in the ward, Jasper Kates (Peter Dobson), reassures her that she will soon have a heart because type A blood is easier to match.

Federal regulators have threatened to pull funding from three more heart transplant programs, continuing a national crackdown on substandard programs that began last year. In letters sent Friday, the U.S. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services gave hospitals in Texas, Minnesota and Indiana 30 days to submit acceptable plans to overhaul their programs. If they are unable to do so, they will lose federal funding.

Dr. Norman Shumway, the Stanford surgeon recognized as the father of heart transplant surgery, died Friday morning at his home in Palo Alto of complications from cancer, the Stanford University School of Medicine announced. He died one day after his 83rd birthday. Although Dr. Christiaan Barnard of South Africa performed the world's first heart transplant in Cape Town in December 1967, beating out Shumway by a month, he did it using techniques developed by Shumway over the preceding decade.

Nick Draper, a 7-month-old twin whose struggle to beat a fatal heart condition has been the focus of a series of Times articles, was in critical condition Thursday after undergoing transplant surgery at UCLA Medical Center, hospital officials said. During an arduous, nearly seven-hour operation that started when he was anesthetized at 3:30 a.m., surgeons opened up Nick's chest, took out his heart and replaced it with a donor heart that the doctors assumed would work efficiently right away.