A heart stopped for at least 20 minutes, from a deceased donor, has given life back to a man who had been waiting for a transplant for two years. It is the sensational surgery successfully completed yesterday in Padua. The patient, a 45-year-old, who had already been operated on as a pediatrician, remains in intensive care but the course is regular and, according to what is learned from the Paduan hospital, "his new heart works very well". The donor was a man suffering from "cardiac death", with irreversible brain damage, such as to make any other therapeutic procedure useless. According to the Italian law, a heart DCD is possible after, at least, 20 minutes. At that point the cadaver organ must be perfused. The challenge is to overcome the ischemic issues which often leads to further damage to the organs, making them unusable. With the new technique developed in Padua, the number of transplants could be increased by 30%. Healthcare in the Veneto region once again confirms itself at the forefront of cardiac surgery. Already in 1985, in fact, the first historic heart transplant in Italy was carried out at the Ca' Foncello hospital in Treviso. The heart was donated by a young man from Treviso, Francesco Bunello and implanted in the chest of Ilario Lazzari.
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