Belgian doctors give woman a new windpipe

Today, she has a new one after surgeons implanted the windpipe from a dead man into her arm, where it grew new tissue before being transplanted into her throat. The way doctors trained her body to accept donor tissue could yield new methods of growing or nurturing organs within patients, experts say.

The technique sounds like science fiction, but De Croock says it has transformed her life. She no longer takes anti-rejection drugs.

"Life before my transplant was becoming less livable all the time, with continual pain and jabbing and pricking in my throat and windpipe," the 54-year-old Belgian told The Associated Press in a telephone interview.

Doctors at Belgium's University Hospital Leuven implanted the donor windpipe in De Croock's arm as a first step in getting her body to accept the organ and to restart its blood supply.

About 10 months later, when enough tissue had grown around it to let her stop taking the drugs, the windpipe was transferred to its proper place. Details of the case are in Thursday's New England Journal of Medicine.

"This is a major step forward for trachea transplantation," said Dr. Pierre Delaere, the surgeon who led the team that treated De Croock.

For years, De Croock lived with the pain and discomfort of having two metal stents propping open her windpipe. She went looking for doctors who might be able to help her and found Delaere on the Internet.

"I had always wondered, 'So many things are possible, why not a new windpipe?'" De Croock said.

Delaere and his colleagues, who had performed similar procedures on a smaller scale for cancer patients, agreed. Once the doctors had a suitable donor windpipe, they wrapped it in De Croock's own tissue and implanted it into her lower left arm. There, they connected it to a large artery to re-establish the blood flow.

1|2|Next Page>>

SharePrintEmail

Write a Comment

Terms

Enter your comments - 3000 characters max

Type in image code

Submit

 Receive China Post promos
 Respond to this email