Woman who had covid19 receives a transplant 0:48
(CNN) ––
A woman from Japan, whose lungs were seriously injured by covid-19, received what doctors say is the world's first lung transplant to a patient recovered from coronavirus, with living donors.
Kyoto University Hospital reported that the woman underwent an 11-hour operation on Wednesday.
The procedure involved a medical team of 30 people who sought to transplant lung tissue from her husband and son into the patient.
The X-ray images show the patient's chest on the left before the transplant operation.
On the right is the same X-ray, but after the operation.
Dark areas indicate where the lung tissue was transplanted.
Covid-19 is known to cause serious lung damage in some patients.
So people around the world, including the United States, have received lung transplants as part of their recovery from the disease.
But the Kyoto hospital indicated that this is the first case in which lung tissue from living donors has been transplanted into a patient with COVID-19.
Dr. Hiroshi Date, a thoracic surgeon at the hospital and who led the operation, said this gives hope to patients suffering from severe lung damage from COVID-19.
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"We show that we now have an option for lung transplants (from living donors)," he said at a press conference on Thursday.
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The patient, identified only as a woman from Japan's western Kansai region, contracted COVID-19 late last year, the hospital said.
In addition, she spent months connected to a life support machine that functioned as an artificial lung, the institution added.
Covid-19 caused so much damage to his lungs that they were no longer functional and he needed a lung transplant in order to live.
The woman's husband and son offered to donate parts of their lungs.
Transplants from brain-dead donors remain rare in Japan, according to the hospital statement.
Therefore, living donors are considered a better option, according to the entity.
Doctors from Japan perform a lung transplant on a covid-19 patient.
The woman's husband and son are stable while she remains in intensive care.
He is expected to be out of the hospital in about two months, according to the institution.
In June of last year, surgeons in the US successfully performed a double lung transplant in a patient with Covid-19.
This is believed to be the first operation of its kind in a person who suffered in the country.
Last month, surgeons in the United States completed a "covid-19 to covid-19" double lung transplant, using lungs from a donor who recovered from coronavirus but died of another cause.
He was received by a patient in his 60s whose lungs were damaged by the disease.
A study of more than 1,700 patients treated in the pandemic's ground zero city of Wuhan, China, found that X-rays of seriously ill patients showed evidence of lung damage months after their infection.
Covid-19 Japan Transplantation
