Health and Medicine
PUBLISHED
3
A double lung transplant has saved the life of a previously healthy young woman who fell seriously ill with Covid-19.
The rest of this article is behind a paywall. Please sign in or subscribe to access the full content.Doctors at Northwestern Medicine in Chicago performed the double-lung transplant on a patient, a Hispanic woman in her 20s who was otherwise healthy, after her lungs were left ravaged by Covid-19. It’s the first time a lung transplant has been carried out on a patient recovering from Covid-19, but the doctors say it was the only option left on the table.
“A lung transplant was her only chance for survival,” Ankit Bharat, MD, chief of thoracic surgery and surgical director of the Northwestern Medicine Lung Transplant Program, said in a statement.
The patient had spent the six previous weeks in the hospital’s Covid-19 intensive care unit on a ventilator and extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO), a life support machine that does the work of the heart and lungs by pumping oxygenated blood around the body.
“For many days, she was the sickest person in the COVID ICU – and possibly the entire hospital,” explains Beth Malsin, MD, pulmonary and critical care specialist at Northwestern Memorial Hospital. “There were so many times, day and night, our team had to react quickly to help her oxygenation and support her other organs to make sure they were healthy enough to support a transplant if and when the opportunity came.”
Eventually, the patient’s Covid-19 tests came back negative. Although the virus had been cleared from the body, she remained in severe condition and the lungs were left with irreversible damage from the infection. Her doctors said the lungs were pitted with holes and "completely plastered" to the tissue around them. In a last-ditch effort to save her life, the patient was put on the list for a double-lung transplant. A matching donor was quickly identified and within 48 hours, a team of surgeons performed the 10-hour procedure at Northwestern Memorial Hospital. The operation has been hailed as a success, but this patient’s battle isn't over yet.
“While this young woman still has a long and potentially risky road to recovery given how sick she was with multi-organ dysfunction for weeks preceding the transplant, we hope she will make a full recovery,” says Rade Tomic, MD, a pulmonologist and medical director of the Lung Transplant Program.
“How did a healthy woman in her 20s get to this point? There’s still so much we have yet to learn about Covid-19. Why are some cases worse than others? The multidisciplinary research team at Northwestern Medicine is trying to find out,” said Tomic.
