Woman ‘breathing wonderfully’ after rare windpipe transplant
extremely difficult,” said Dr. David Klassen, chief medical officer for the United Network for Organ Sharing, or UNOS, which oversees the nation’s transplant system. “It’s been a very difficult thing to crack.”
Experts say it’s too soon to deem Sein’s transplant a total success — which UNOS said is the first of its kind in the United States. Sein, 56, has to take powerful drugs to prevent organ rejection, but doctors hope to try to wean her off in a
MARSHALL RITZEL/AP few years.
Sein’s ordeal started in 2014 when doctors put a tube in her throat to help her breathe during a severe asthma attack. It saved the social worker’s life but damaged her trachea.
Several surgeries to reconstruct her windpipe didn’t help and left Sein in despair at constant risk of suffocation.
Until now, doctors have had few good options to treat serious trachea damage as the windpipe is much more than a simple tube.
Over the years, various methods have been used to repair or reconstruct damaged windpipes. Doctors can remove damaged sections, or fix or replace them with prosthetics, lab-grown tissue or self-supplied tissue from a patient’s skin and rib cartilage.
But these techniques may not restore full function to the organ, which uses tiny hairs to move mucus around and has the perfect flexibility to expand and collapse as we breathe, swallow and cough.
And these methods are not possible in the most dire situations where a patient’s entire windpipe is damaged. Something as extreme as a transplant could be their only hope, said Dr. Eric Genden, a Mount Sinai surgeon who led the team.
“Right now, we don’t talk much about those patients because there is no option for them,” Genden said. “We’re hoping that this procedure will ... help not only the patients that are teetering on disaster, but also the patients that are currently kind of deemed hopeless.”
In an 18-hour operation, a team of more than 50 specialists transplanted a donor trachea, carefully reconnecting it to a complex web of tiny blood vessels.
Doctors say the procedure could help others with tracheal birth defects, untreatable airway diseases or extensive damage from ventilators.
Sein is now recovering at home and “is breathing wonderfully,” Genden said.