Feb. 13, 2007 - 21:31 MST

AT THE END OF THE TUNNEL

Remarkable how much good can come from research and common sense, especially when the two are combined. There is an article in today's The Rocky Mountain News that brings some encouragement to folks who care. It is by Lauran Neergaard of The Associated Press and quoted here in full :

WRONG-TYPE HEART A WORKING MATCH

Infants' bodies more adaptable to transplants

WASHINGTON -- "Connor Geddes was 13 days old when surgeons gave him a new heart that didn't match his blood type -- deliberately."

"Connor, now 11 months old and thriving, is one of several dozen babies around the world to have received mismatched hearts, part of a slowly growing movement to increase these tiniest patients' survival by taking advantage of a lag in their immune systems."

"Now the nation's transplant network is expanding that effort, saying youngsters may be candidates for an incompatible heart up to age 2."

"It's the first step in a new push by the United Network for Organ Sharing to decrease the number of children who die awaiting an organ transplant, a toll particularly high for infants and toddlers."

"It will not happen overnight," cautioned Dr. Stuart Sweet of Washington University in St. Louis, chairman of UNOS pedriatric transplant committee. But the new heart guidelines, "have the potential for significantly impacting the number of patients who die on the waiting list."

" If the policy sounds counterintuitive, well it is: Implant a mismatched heart in an adult, and he or she will die rapidly. That happened in 2003 , when surgeons in North Carolina accidentally gave a teenager the wrong type heart and lungs."

"But babies' immune systems must learn to recognize and attack an organ of a different blood type, a process that's turning out to be more gradual than scientists long thought."

"Transplant a heart before the baby starts making antibodies that will attack a mismatched organ, and he or she survives as well as babies given matching hearts, says Dr. Lori West. the Canadian surgeon who pioneered incompatible transplants in Toronto in the late 1990s."

Those babies still need immune-suppressing drugs for life -- blood type is just one form of organ rejection."

"But given the scarcity of hearts, the mismatch option was good news. In 2005, the last count available, 45 children under age 2 died while awaiting a new heart. As of last month, 74 youngsters under 2 were on the waiting list."

"About one in 5,000 children are born with a heart defect so bad that they'll need a transplant in the first year or two of life."

"Last March, Connor Geddes of Erie, Pa., became Pittsburgh's first of five such transplants. His heart's left side was too small to pump. Doctors said Connor wouldn't live long enough to await a heart that matched his Type A blood, but they had a heart from a Type B donor."

"It still amazes me," says Carrie Geddes. "When we talk to people, friends, and tell them, nobody really realizes that can happen."

"Eleven months later, Connor shows no sign of rejection and happily totters after his older brothers. His tracheotomy tube -- the lungs were weakened by heart-pumping machines while he awaited the transplant -- is to be removed soon, and the scar on his chest is barely visible."

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Who knows, perhaps the baby recipient of a mismatched heart will someday be a leader in the world. Then we will truly know that his or her heart is in the right place regardless of the mismatch.

I keep searching the media for truly good news and occasionally find something like this article. Good news it is, indeed.

Maybe this will lead the way to further advances in medical science that will enable the condemned by nature to live and thrive, I do sincerely pray that this will be the blessed light AT THE END OF THE TUNNEL . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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