Take a moment and think about your heart.  None of that lovey-dovey crap, this muscle is all business, beating over 2.5 billion times in the average person’s life.  It pumps blood an average of 12,000 miles per day, every day, for your entire life.  And when it decides to stop, bad news ensues.  That’s where the heart transplant comes into play.  When all else fails and the heart cannot be saved, doctors don’t give up hope or just say sorry, they replace that bugger with a new one.  The truly miraculous procedure of heart transplantation goes into the center of the body and replaces what was traditionally considered to be the most important organ.

Modern day heart transplants are normally conducted by donations from recently deceased or brain-dead donors.  The heart is taken out of the donor and given a potassium chloride injection to stop the heart from beating.  It is capable of surviving outside of the body for about 4-6 hours.  In this last year in the United States, there were about 2300 successful heart transplants (3500 worldwide) while 800 U.S. patients died while waiting for a suitable donor.  More than half of U.S. heart transplant patients are between 50 and 70 years old.

The road to successful heart transplants was a bit of a rocky one.  The first heart transplant was conducted in 1964 when a monkey heart was placed in the chest of a dying man.  This, of course, raised a great number of ethical considerations.  Unfortunately, the man’s life was only prolonged for about 90 minutes, but the procedure set the stage for future operations between humans.  The first intra-human operation was performed in 1967 with a heart from a brain-dead donor.  The patient lived only 18 days before succumbing to pneumonia.

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