Food for thought! Again when does death begin or how long can life be prolonged with the latest medical interventions?
On the life's edge!
What about the last will of the designated donor?
"More than 3500 people in the United States receive a new heart each year."
"New techniques give ‘life’ to hearts after circulatory death
Heart transplant surgeons have long depended on organ donors who have been declared brain dead. More recently, they have also begun to retrieve hearts from people who retain some brain function but die after their heartbeat and circulation both cease—an approach known as donation after circulatory death (DCD).
To ensure that a donor heart still works after it has stopped beating, doctors currently use one of two methods to briefly reanimate the organ.
In some cases, an external device pumps warm, oxygenated blood through the heart after it has been removed. Unfortunately, these machines are extraordinarily expensive, labor-intensive, and often don’t give a realistic assessment of a heart’s function.
The other option, known as normothermic regional perfusion (NRP), restarts the heart while it is still inside the donor’s body—a method that, unlike external devices, can also be used for pediatric hearts. But NRP lies at the center of a fierce ethical debate. Some critics argue that it blurs the definition of death, and many hospitals prohibit its use.
Now, surgeons at two separate institutions have developed new ways to circumvent these ethical issues.
One approach uses a simplified circuit to temporarily reanimate infants’ hearts on the surgical table—a breakthrough that could potentially expand the donor pool for pediatric heart transplants in the U.S. by up to 20%.
The other strategy , lead study author Aaron Williams explains, challenges a fundamental assumption about heart transplantation: “Do you even need to reanimate the heart?”"
ScienceAdviser
