Organ Transplants

In the more than 30 years since they were first performed, organ transplants have become highly successful procedures, with patients' survival rates for the most popular type--kidney transplants--as high as 93% one year after surgery, according to a major national study. For transplants other than kidneys, the one-year survival rate for patients is nearly as encouraging: 88.7% for pancreas, 82.1% for heart, 74.4% for liver, 53.3% for heart-lung and 53.9% for lung, the study said.

After nearly 25 years of marital happiness, Jeff and Rosemarie Litoff are considering a divorce. But not because of the usual problems that break up families. Their fight is against a degenerative disease that is gradually weakening Jeff's heart. Last month, the 50-year-old appliance repairman was told by his doctors that without a heart transplant he had less than a year to live.

Tabatha Foster, the world's longest survivor of a five-organ transplant, died Wednesday after an infection caused her heart, kidneys and liver to fail, a spokeswoman at Children's Hospital of Pittsburgh said. The 3-year-old girl from Madisonville, Ky., died in the hospital's intensive-care unit, spokeswoman Sue Cardillo said. "It was system failure, everything. It was like a chain reaction," she said.

Three-year-old Tabatha Foster, the nation's longest survivor of a five-organ transplant, responded to her parents and nurses Saturday after more surgery to repair pinpoint openings that had not healed at her intestinal suture line. Doctors operated Friday night after Tabatha complained of discomfort, a Children's Hospital spokesman said. The Madisonville, Ky., girl last weekend got a new liver, pancreas, small intestine and parts of a stomach and colon. She was in critical but stable condition.

The nation's fifth recipient of an abdominal transplant of multiple organs died Friday at Children's Hospital of Pittsburgh. Three-year-old Rolandrea Dodge of Fruitland, N. M., who received a new liver, pancreas, stomach, small intestine and part of a large intestine Nov. 29, died of multiple organ failure.

A teenager from Mexico whose family moved to the United States so she could get a heart and lung transplant was near death Monday after mistakenly receiving organs from a donor with a different blood type. "This was a tragic error, and we accept responsibility for our part," William Fulkerson, chief executive of Duke University Hospital, said in a statement Monday. Jesica Santillam, 17, suffers from a heart deformity that prevents her lungs from pumping enough oxygen into her blood.

Five-year-old Laura Davies, who captured hearts around the world--from fellow Britons including Princess Diana to Saudi Arabia's King Fahd--died Thursday, nearly two months after her second multiple organ transplant. Leslie Davies and his wife, Fran, decided to have their daughter's breathing machine disconnected after she had a stroke and lost consciousness Wednesday night. The stroke caused irreversible brain damage, said Dr. Andreas Tzakis of Children's Hospital.

Patients with HIV are successfully receiving liver and kidney transplants, researchers reported Thursday, challenging widespread reluctance by transplant centers to give scarce organs to people with the incurable disease. The research, presented at a transplant conference in Miami, offers the latest medical ripple traced to the powerful drugs that revolutionized AIDS care in the mid-1990s.

When the parents of a 7-year-old Northern California boy murdered in Italy allowed his organs to be given to people who would have died without them, it was an inspirational example of the gift of life that can come only from tragedy. Organ transplant--with the partial exception of living related donors for kidneys--is the only medical procedure in which a person can live only if another dies.

Scientists announced Thursday that they have cloned piglets lacking both copies of a gene that makes the human immune system reject transplanted organs from pigs. In the United States, Britain and other countries, organ failure is the major cause of death and disability. With a shortage of human organs for transplant, many die while waiting for them--6,000 last year in the United States.