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Dead hearts can actually be transplanted with a new machine. Critics question the compatibility with the Transplantation Act and are therefore filing criminal charges against the new method.
In March, a heart from a donor who had died of cardiac arrest was transplanted for the first time in Switzerland, as the “Tages-Anzeiger” reported on Friday. In contrast to previous donors, the heart had already stopped before it was removed.
So far, only hearts from brain dead people have been transplanted
With the help of a new machine, a team from the University Hospital Zurich succeeded in supplying the donor heart with blood and oxygen again outside the body, so that it starts beating again. The heart recovers in the machine, explains Franz Immer, Director of the Swisstransplant Foundation, “and if you have a healthy heart, you can transplant this heart successfully”.
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Franz Immer, Director of the Swisstransplant Foundation, says that the results of the four heart transplants so far using the new method have all been very positive.
Keystone/Christian Beutler (archive)
So far, hearts have only been taken from donors who were brain-dead in intensive care units. The circulation was still working for them, it was maintained mechanically for the donation, so that the organs of these people were still supplied with blood.
New method already implemented four times in Switzerland
Since the new transplantation method was used for the first time in March, four more hearts that had once stopped have been transplanted, says Immer.
Nevertheless, Swisstransplant has not yet communicated this innovation. “We basically wanted to wait for the first results,” explains the Swisstransplant director of the delayed communication. However, the results are consistently very positive.
The waiting time for a donor heart in Switzerland is currently around a year, says Immer. Thanks to the new machine, however, significantly more hearts could be transplanted in the future.
Criminal complaint filed against new method
However, the new method has also been criticized, for example by the pastor and moral theologian Roland Graf. Together with Human Life International Switzerland and the Äpol association, the association of doctors and nurses against organ donation at the end of life, he has filed a criminal complaint.
We have filed criminal charges to investigate whether this is compatible with transplant law.
“We filed this criminal complaint so that the matter could really be investigated and it could also be determined whether this was really compatible with the Transplantation Act,” says Graf. This law states that the brain must have failed irreversibly. “And I think that’s clearly not the case when it comes to organ harvesting after cardiac arrest.”
Medicine: Also irreversible brain damage in cardiac arrest
One speaks of a cardiac arrest when the organs and especially the heart have failed beyond repair. In medicine, it is generally assumed that the brain has suffered irreversible damage no later than five minutes after such a standstill because it has not received any air supply during this time.
However, critics such as Roland Graf doubt that people can already be defined as brain dead at this point. They believe that after a cardiac arrest you have to wait longer before you can declare someone dead. Graf and his fellow campaigners therefore demand that the discussion about when a person is really dead has to be conducted publicly again in view of the new transplantation method.