A 71-year-old man arrived at an Italian hospital two years ago with symptoms typical of someone experiencing heart trouble. He was short of breath. He was sweating profusely. And his blood pressure was low. But when doctors took a closer look, they noticed immediately that this was not the typical patient.
The man had two hearts. He had undergone a rare heart transplant years ago in which a new organ was paired with the diseased one, according to a report
in the Annals of Emergency Medicine. The hospital doctors noticed that the two hearts had developed independent rhythms and attempted drug therapy to correct the problem. Suddenly, both of the patient’s hearts stopped beating and he lost consciousness. But one jolt with a heart defibrillator miraculously brought the man back to life. Doctors then replaced his pacemaker but left both hearts intact, capping one of the most bizarre medical cases in recent memory. “We haven’t ever seen anything similar to this case before,” Dr. Giacomo Mugnai said in an email to MSNBC.com.
Local doctors were similarly awed by the case. “I’ve never seen a double heart,” said Dr. David Friedman, chief of heart failure services at North Shore University Hospital in Plainview, L.I. “It’s amazing.”
The extraordinary ordeal happened in 2010, but it was described for the first time in the latest issue of the “Annals of Emergency Medicine.” “To date, he is in good clinical condition, with no further arrhythmias,” the report says. Seven years before the man showed up at the hospital, he had undergone a procedure known as a heterotopic heart transplant, in which a new heart is implanted into a patient’s body to support the malfunctioning one.
“The patients’ orginal heart has a chance to improve and recover,” said Friedman. “If the donor heart fails, it can be removed, leaving the patient’s original heart in place.”
At the time, the man was experiencing end-stage heart disease, according to the report. But a common complication of the outdated procedure is for the hearts to develop independent rhythms, which is precisely what happened in the case of the Italian man.
Heterotopic heart transplants are almost unheard of these days because of the development of small, portable devices that do the job of the second heart.
Ten years ago, these machines, called ventricular assist devices, were extremely large and expensive.
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