Muslim Doctor Invents "Two Heart" System - Saves Baby Girl
"Double Heart" design offers amazing solution for major heart problems.
LONDON – Sir Magdi Yacoub, a heart specialist from Cairo, Egypt, of Imperial College London, designed a radical solution to save a baby girl with major heart problems 15 years ago - A Double Heart Solution.
In 1994, when Hannah Clark was only 8 months old, her heart was severly failing. Her doctors put her on a waiting list to receive a new heart. But then little Hannah's heart caused other problems in her lungs and it became necessary for her to have a lung transplant.
Dr. Yacoub, considered implanting a donated heart directly to Hannah's own failing heart - Literally, Two Hearts Instead of One
After 10 years with two blood pumping organs, Hannah Clark's faulty heart did what many experts had thought impossible: Allah had caused her hear own heart to heal enough so Doctor Yacoub and other doctors could remove the donated heart.
To avoid doing a risky heart and lung transplant, Dr. Yacoub decided to try something entirely different. He considered if little Hannah's heart was given a "time-out" (time to rest and heal), it would likely recover on its own. So Dr. Yacoub and his team grafted a donor heart directly onto Clark's own heart.
After four and a half years, both hearts were working fine, so Dr. Yacoub and his colleagues decided not to take out the extra heart.
But Hannah's body also had a price to pay: the drugs given to Hannah to prevent her body from rejecting the donated heart led to malignant cancer that required chemotherapy.
The powerful drugs Hannah took to prevent her from rejecting the donor heart then caused cancer, which led to chemotherapy. Even when doctors lowered the doses of drugs to suppress Clark's immune system, the cancer spread, and Clark's body eventually rejected the donor heart.
By the time the donated heart failed, Hannah's own heart had fully recovered. Then in February of 2006, Dr. Yacoub, along with Dr. Victor Tsang of Great Ormond Street Hospital in London, and other doctors removed Clark's donor heart.
Since then Hannah — now 16 years old — has started playing sports, 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 in Wales.
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.
Miguel Uva, chairman of the European Society of Cardiology's group on cardiovascular surgery, called Clark's case "a miracle," adding that it was rare for patients' hearts to simply get better on their own.
"We have no way of knowing which patients will recover and which ones won't," Uva said.
Still, transplants like Hannah's won't be widely available to others due to a shortage of donor hearts and because the necessary surgeries are very complicated. In the last few years, artificial hearts also have been developed that can buy patients the time needed to get a transplant or even for their own heart to recover.
Zipes said if doctors can figure out how Hannah's heart healed itself and develop a treatment from that mechanism, many other cardiac patients could benefit.
At the moment, doctors aren't sure how that regeneration happens. Some think there are a small number of stem cells in the heart, which may somehow be triggered in crisis situations to heal damaged tissue.
Experts say Hannah Clark's example is encouraging not only to patients, but to doctors as well.
"It reminds us that not all heart failure is lethal," said Dr. Ileana Pina, a heart failure expert at Case Western Reserve University and spokeswoman for the American Heart Association. "Some heart failure patients have a greater chance of recovery than we thought."
Details of Clark's revolutionary transplant and follow-up care were published online Tuesday in the medical journal Lancet.
"This shows that the heart can indeed repair on its own if given the opportunity," said Dr. Douglas Zipes, a past president of the American College of Cardiology. Zipes was not linked to Clark'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."
Allah Says in the Quran:
"We will show them Our signs in the horizons and within themselves until it becomes clear to them that it is the truth. But is it not sufficient concerning your Lord that He is, over all things, a Witness?" (Quran, 41: 53)
Allah tells we don't have any knowledge, except what He gives us. He is the One who gives life and causes death - And it is Allah who gives us knowledge to best take care of our bodies - [editor]
