NYC Doctors performs first heart transplant from an HIV-positive donor –

New York City doctors performed the first heart transplant of an HIV-positive person.

An unnamed woman in her 60s suffering from advanced heart failure received a heart and kidney transplant from the same HIV-positive donor in the spring, doctors at Montefiore Health in the Bronx, New York City, announced this week. The woman herself also had HIV.

Organ transplantation from HIV-positive donors was banned in the United States until 2013. These are now permitted in the context of research into how a body will respond to new organs.

As more than 100,000 Americans await a new organ – and more than a dozen people on this list die every day – doctors hope that even a small expansion of the donation pool will save more lives. Matching HIV-positive patients with other HIV-positive donors may also allow for more efficient use of other resources.

“This is something that hasn’t been done before. Using organs that haven’t been used in the past is part of a larger effort,” said David Klassen, medical director of United Network for Organ Sharing at DailyMail.com.

The demand for new organs will always exceed the worldwide supply. Official numbers show 106,023 Americans awaiting an organ donation Friday afternoon.

By comparison, only about 40,000 transplants are performed each year. This leads to many people dying in anticipation of a new organ, and the list of potential recipients grows steadily.

Obtaining a heart transplant, in particular, can be difficult. Beneficiaries should hope to find a suitable donor whose cause of death did not harm their hearts.

This led doctors from Montefiore, one of 25 hospitals in America eligible to perform the surgery, to decide to offer an HIV-positive transplant to a long-awaited woman.

“We’ve been waiting and thinking for a while, why don’t we talk to the patient about this? Montefiore cardiologist Dr. Omar Saeed really acknowledged and accepted the risks and benefits and signed the approval.” Bronx Times.

His four-hour surgery was successful and he is recovering at home after spending five weeks in the hospital.

But it took time and political will to get to this point. During the AIDS crisis in the 1980s, organ donation by HIV-positive Americans was banned.

On the one hand, the ban protected HIV-negative people from catching the virus out of desperation to get the organ.

It also prevented HIV-positive patients for whom organ harvesting from a positive person posed no additional risk.

But with medical and technological advances in recent years, the virus is no longer a death sentence and more HIV-positive people will need such transplants.

An HIV patient can take antiretroviral drugs indefinitely, which will prevent the virus from developing in AIDS and also prevent the infection from being passed on to someone else.

“Heart transplants have always been very limited,” Klassmen told DailyMail.com.

“HIV treatment has changed so much over the years that what was once a deadly disease was more of a chronic one.”

In 2013, the HOPE (HIV Organ Policy Equity) law was passed, lifting the ban on HIV-positive donors and giving infected people more opportunities to receive critical medical care.

This makes it all the more important to offer more options, as HIV-positive patients live much longer and have greater medical needs over time.

“Any effort to expand into a potential donor pool is a good thing,” he added.