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Woman given man's windpipe
Source: Agencies |
January 15, 2010, Friday
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Print Edition
Print Edition
FOR more than a quarter of a century, Linda De Croock lived with constant pain from a car accident that smashed her windpipe.
Today, she has a new one after surgeons implanted the windpipe from a dead man into her arm, where it grew new tissue before being transplanted into her throat. The way doctors trained her body to accept donor tissue could yield new methods of growing or nurturing organs within patients, experts say.
The technique sounds like science fiction, but De Croock says it has transformed her life. She no longer takes anti-rejection drugs.
"Life before my transplant was becoming less livable all the time, with continual pain and jabbing and pricking in my throat and windpipe," said the 54-year-old Belgian.
Doctors at Belgium's University Hospital Leuven implanted the donor windpipe in De Croock's arm as a first step in getting her body to accept the organ and to restart its blood supply.
Ten months later, when enough tissue had grown around it to let her stop taking the drugs, the windpipe was transferred to its proper place. Details of the case were published in yesterday's New England Journal of Medicine.
For years, De Croock lived with the pain and discomfort of having two metal stents propping open her windpipe.
De Croock said having a windpipe in her arm felt strange and uncomfortable. "It was packed in with gauze and my whole arm was in plaster," she said. "So it's not like (I could) peel potatoes."
Patrick Warnke, a tissue-engineering expert at Bond University in Australia, said it was the first time a donor organ as large as the trachea was nurtured inside the recipient's own body before being transplanted.
Today, she has a new one after surgeons implanted the windpipe from a dead man into her arm, where it grew new tissue before being transplanted into her throat. The way doctors trained her body to accept donor tissue could yield new methods of growing or nurturing organs within patients, experts say.
The technique sounds like science fiction, but De Croock says it has transformed her life. She no longer takes anti-rejection drugs.
"Life before my transplant was becoming less livable all the time, with continual pain and jabbing and pricking in my throat and windpipe," said the 54-year-old Belgian.
Doctors at Belgium's University Hospital Leuven implanted the donor windpipe in De Croock's arm as a first step in getting her body to accept the organ and to restart its blood supply.
Ten months later, when enough tissue had grown around it to let her stop taking the drugs, the windpipe was transferred to its proper place. Details of the case were published in yesterday's New England Journal of Medicine.
For years, De Croock lived with the pain and discomfort of having two metal stents propping open her windpipe.
De Croock said having a windpipe in her arm felt strange and uncomfortable. "It was packed in with gauze and my whole arm was in plaster," she said. "So it's not like (I could) peel potatoes."
Patrick Warnke, a tissue-engineering expert at Bond University in Australia, said it was the first time a donor organ as large as the trachea was nurtured inside the recipient's own body before being transplanted.
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