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Tuesday, July 14, 2009

Girl's heart heals itself?!?!?!

Absolutely AMAZING. How could one NOT believe in God's healing powers when you hear about this story? This wasn't just medical experimentation. It was not expected by doctors and still 'unexplained' as to how it happened.

Could this be God communicating a new treatment for heart failure???? Possible stem cells in the heart???

Listen, Doctors. HE is talking to you.

STORY LINK HERE
LONDON – British doctors designed a radical solution to save a girl with
major heart problems in 1995: they implanted a donor heart directly onto her own
failing heart.
After 10 years with two blood pumping organs, Hannah Clark's
faulty one did what many experts had thought impossible: it healed itself enough
so that doctors could remove the donated heart.
But she also had a price to
pay: the drugs Clark took to prevent her body from rejecting the donated heart
led to malignant cancer that required chemotherapy.
Details of Clark's
revolutionary transplant and follow-up care were published online Tuesday in the
medical journal Lancet.
"This shows that the heart can indeed repair itself
if given the opportunity," said Dr. Douglas Zipes, a past president of the
American College of Cardiology. Zipes was not linked to Clark's treatment or to
the Lancet paper. "The heart apparently has major regenerative powers, and it is
now key to find out how they work."
In 1994, when Clark was eight months old,
she developed severe heart failure and doctors put her on a waiting list to get
a new heart. But Clark's heart difficulties caused problems with her lungs,
meaning she also needed a lung transplant.
To avoid doing a risky heart and
lung transplant, doctors decided to try something completely different.
Sir
Magdi Yacoub of Imperial College London, one of the world's top heart surgeons,
said that if Clark's heart was given a time-out, it might be able to recover on
its own. So in 1995 Yacoub and others grafted a donor heart from a 5-month-old
directly onto Clark's own heart.
After four and a half years, both hearts
were working fine, so Yacoub and colleagues decided not to take out the extra
heart.
The powerful drugs Clark was taking to prevent her from rejecting the
donor heart then caused cancer, which led to chemotherapy. Even when doctors
lowered the doses of drugs to suppress Clark's immune system, the cancer spread,
and Clark's body eventually rejected the donor heart.
Luckily, by that time,
Clark's own heart seemed to have fully recovered. In February 2006, Dr. Victor
Tsang of Great Ormond Street Hospital in London, Yacoub and other doctors
removed Clark's donor heart.
Since then, Clark — now 16 years old — has
started playing sports, gotten a part-time job, and plans to go back to school
in September.
"Thanks to this operation, I've now got a normal life just like
all of my friends," said Clark, who lives near Cardiff.
Her parents marveled
at her recovery, and said that at one point during Clark's illness, they were
told she would be dead within 12 hours.
Miguel Uva, chairman of the European
Society of Cardiology's group on cardiovascular surgery, called Clark's case "a
miracle," adding that it was rare for patients' hearts to simply get better on
their own.
"We have no way of knowing which patients will recover and which
ones won't," Uva said.
Still, transplants like Clark's won't be widely
available to others due to a shortage of donor hearts and because the necessary
surgeries are very complicated. In the last few years, artificial hearts also
have been developed that can buy patients the time needed to get a transplant or
even for their own heart to recover.
Zipes said if doctors can figure out how
Clark's heart healed itself and develop a treatment from that mechanism, many
other cardiac patients could benefit.
At the moment, doctors aren't sure how
that regeneration happens. Some think there are a small number of stem cells in
the heart, which may somehow be triggered in crisis situations to heal damaged
tissue.
Experts said Clark's example is encouraging both to doctors and
patients.
"It reminds us that not all heart failure is lethal," said Dr.
Ileana Pina, a heart failure expert at Case Western Reserve University and
spokeswoman for the American Heart Association. "Some heart failure patients
have a greater chance of recovery than we thought."

2 comments:

Niki Lounsberry Morris said...

I was so going to send this to you tonight! I'm glad you read it.

Kara said...

Amazing!