What you should know
- The world’s first transplant of an HIV-positive heart into a patient with HIV was performed in the Bronx.
- Montefiore Health System said the transplant was successful and involved a patient in her sixties suffering from advanced heart failure.
- It was not until 2013 that the HIV Organ Equity Policy Act allowed people living with HIV to donate their organs to an HIV-positive recipient. However, it has taken nearly a decade for such a heart transplant to be performed.
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NEW YORK — The world’s first transplant of an HIV-positive heart into an HIV-positive patient was performed in the Bronx.
Montefiore Health System said the transplant was successful and involved a patient in her sixties suffering from advanced heart failure.
The patient not only received the heart transplant, but also simultaneously received a kidney transplant earlier this spring, according to the hospital.
After a five-week recovery period, the patient now sees her doctors frequently so they can check on her health, according to the hospital.
It was not until 2013 that the HIV Organ Equity Policy Act allowed people living with HIV to donate their organs to an HIV-positive recipient. However, it has taken nearly a decade for such a heart transplant to be performed.
“Thanks to significant medical advances, people living with HIV can control the disease so well that they can now save the lives of others living with this condition,” said Dr. Ulrich P. Jorde, chief of the Section of Heart Failure, Heart Transplants and Mechanical Circulatory Support, and Deputy Chief of the Division of Cardiology at Montefiore and Einstein Professor of Medicine.
“This surgery is a milestone in the history of organ donation and offers new hope to people who previously had no one to turn to,” Jorde said.
Montefiore is one of only 25 centers in the country that is eligible to offer this type of surgery because it has met certain criteria and results established by the Organ Procurement and Transplantation Network.
In the United States alone, there are between 60,000 and 100,000 people who need a new heart. However, last year, only about 3,800 transplants were performed.
“This was a complicated case and a true multidisciplinary effort of cardiology, surgery, nephrology, infectious diseases, critical care and immunology,” said the patient’s cardiologist, Dr. Omar Saeed, who is also an assistant professor of medicine at Einstein.
“Making this option available to people living with HIV broadens the donor pool and means more people, with or without HIV, will have faster access to a life-saving organ.”
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