Full recovery for two hearts girl

For more than a decade, 16-year-old Hannah Clark made history by living with two hearts beating as one.

Three-and-a-half years after her “piggy-back” donor heart was removed, doctors say the Wales teenager’s own heart is now in perfect working condition.

Hannah received the lifesaving transplant operation at the age of two when her own enlarged heart began to fail.

Clark’s piggy-back transplant is believed to be the only operation of its kind in Britain, and perhaps the world.

Sir Magdi Yacoub, the pioneering surgeon who performed Hannah’s original transplant when she was two, said he was “surprised and delighted.”

In 1995, the teenager was diagnosed with cardiomyopathy, a disease that affects one in every 100,000 child.

Doctors said Hannah’s heart muscles were so stretched that part of the organ was double its normal size, and was struggling to pump blood.

Doctors grafted the new heart, which once belonged to a five-month-old girl onto Hannah’s heart.

The donor heart was able to take over most of the role of pumping blood around Hannah’s body, effectively allowing her own beating heart to rest.

Ten years after her surgery, she started experiencing side effects from the immunosuppressant drugs she was taking to prevent the rejection of the donor organ. She had developed tumors that had began to spread and needed chemotherapy.

At one point, doctors told her parents, Paul and Liz Clark that their daughter had only 12 hours to live.

Doctors decided to reduce Hannah’s immunosuppressant drugs but this led to her body rejecting the donor heart, so doctors at London’s Great Ormond Street Hospital decided the only option was to disconnect the donor organ.

They had discovered that Hannah’s own heart had recovered enough to cope on its own without daily medication.

“It has changed everything,” Hannah said. “I couldn’t go out before because my chest was so bad and when I did, my mother and father used to follow me because they were worried.”

Hannah admits that it felt strange at first with only one heart saying, “I could actually feel that something was missing in my chest.  But I was so happy.”

Cardiologists have long wondered whether a heart that is failing because of cardomyopathy might be able to recover if rested.

Professor Peter Weissberg, of the British Heart Foundation said experts are currently working to perfect a mechanical heart called a ventricular assist device that can be used in children temporarily to take over the work of a weak heart while it recovers.

A similar device already exists for adults with heart failure awaiting a donor transplant.