An operation to transplant a new heart and lungs into someone.
A surgical procedure to remove a diseased heart and lungs and replace them with a healthy heart and lungs from a recently deceased donor. Heart-lung transplant is performed only on those who have both severely diseased lungs and advanced heart disease, are likely to die soon without the procedure, and have no other life- threatening diseases, such as diabetes mellitus.
An operation in which a patient’s diseased lungs and heart are removed and replaced with donor organs from someone who has been certified as ‘brain dead. As well as the technical difficulties of such an operation, rejection by the recipient’s tissues of donated heart and lungs has proved hard to overcome. Since the early 1990s, however, immunosuppressant drug therapy such as ciclosporin has facilitated the regular use of this type of surgery. Even so, patients receiving transplanted hearts and lungs face substantial risks, such as lung infection and airway obstruction, as well as the long-term problems of transplant rejection.