Heart transplanted for 20 minutes, world premiere in Padua

2023-05-15 17:21:55

And heart stopped for 20 minutes was successfully transplanted in Padua on May 11, on a 45-year-old man. The intervention was announced today by the university hospital of the Venetian city, the same one where almost 38 years ago – on November 14, 1985 – the first heart transplant in our country was performed. “It is the first time in the world that a stopped heart is reactivated and implanted without damage that could jeopardize the transplant after such a long time – says the president of the Veneto Region, Luca Zaia, who spoke at the presentation of the intervention – and this opens up frontiers unthinkable compared to the possible use of organs to be transplanted”. According to experts, this result “could lead to a 30% increase in the number of transplants in Italy”.

“Once again it is the health care of the Veneto that crosses a new frontier of medicine – underlines the governor – From today, cardiac surgery will no longer be the same, because a perspective is opening up that can restore hope to many patients who are waiting for a heart transplant. We owe it, with gratitude, to the entire University Hospital of Padua, to Professor Gino Gerosa and his team “of the Aou Cardiac Surgery” and to Dr. Paolo Zanatta, director of Anesthesia and Intensive Care at Ca’ Foncello” in Treviso, “who performed the removal of the organ. Extraordinary professionals, to whom we extend our proud compliments”.

That of 1985 – the first heart transplant in Italy, donated by the young Treviso native Francesco Bunello, and implanted in the chest of the 40-year-old Ilario Lazzari from the province of Venice by Vincenzo Gallucci, in whose memory the heart surgery center of Padua is named – was “a historic moment” thanks to which “we crossed a threshold that was unthinkable until recently. Today history repeats itself – Zaia remarks – thanks to a great pupil of Gallucci and to the technological and scientific advances that have followed one another since then in that same Paduan structure that has never stopped keeping up with the times and often, as in this case, has been able to anticipate them”.