Man Survives Unusual Double Heart Attack

Man Survives Unusual Double Heart Attack: The first man, which in 2010, Verona, Italy reported to the emergency room about didn't seem to be anything unusual. He was short of breath, sweating, and low blood pressure-heart trouble, no doubt. E.R. doctors see similar symptoms all the time.

But this guy really was very different. He had two hearts.

"We never before saw anything similar in this case," Dr. Giyakomo Mugnai said in an e-mail.

It turned out that a few years ago, man a heterotopic heart transplants had undergone the process known as. Unlike an orthotopic transplantation, which is an organ is removed and another in its place, add a heterotopic transplant diseased with a new part. "We heart patients or kidney patients see, sometimes," Dr. Temple University emergency medicine Rade Vukmir explained, emergency physicians-American College Professor and a spokesman for. "Leave in place a kidney surgeon if it is too much trouble to take out, or if there is hope for recovery of a kidney, or have a heart, after a period of time could be helped by a new organ.

Sick, Italian, in the case of the report in the history of emergency medicine, transplant team your bad old one with my new heart was mated. Chambers and two hearts were married so that new blood vessels of the heart is able to support the old one.

But there is a risk, Vukmir explained. "You have two independent heart rhythms where a heart Gets a little better, especially in a scenario developed," he said.

That's why what happened from the 71-year-old Italian. First doctors drug therapy to correct the problem, try dustalta, but your blood pressure drop and eventually continued on to her heart — really stopped my heart-, he lost consciousness, and stopped breathing. A heart defibrillator brought it back with a jerk. Surgeons implanted the pacemaker, and today he is healthy, and still with two hearts.

Such cases are extremely rare these days, Vukmir explained. In the 1990s and 2000s, external machines called in to assist in the second Italian man nilay heart devices to work was to be used, but they were huge, and very expensive. A second was a viable alternative to the heart. Today, however, the size of a manageable, portable devices and heterotopic heart transplants were almost never for shrinking. Good luck Vukmir, well-trained doctors er know that some people are still with the body that give new meaning to the Word are walking around "a lotta heart."