First 'breathing lung' transplant in US performed at UCLA
ABC7 Los Angeles | Denise Dador
LOS ANGELES (KABC) -- A local man became the first in the country to receive a "breathing lung" transplant in mid November. A team of doctors and nurses at Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center were able to keep a set of donor lungs alive and breathing outside of the body as they're transported into the operating room.
Experts said it's a medical breakthrough that could save thousands of people who die every year waiting for a transplant.
A condition called pulmonary fibrosis was slowly hardening the lungs of 57-year-old Fernando Padilla of Alta Loma. He was tethered to his oxygen tank, hoping for a lung transplant.
"I thought it was pneumonia, I thought it was bronchitis. Nothing ever entered my head that my lungs were messed up," Padilla said. "I couldn't do nothing. I had to have everybody doing things for me."
The longtime construction worker, who helped build the very hospital he was staying in, wanted to do more. He volunteered to be part of a new clinical trial examining the delivery of living lungs.
During transport, the organ was infused with blood and oxygen, allowing them to breathe on their own.
"It maintains the donor lungs outside of a human body on a box in a near physiologic state," said Dr. Abbas Ardehali, the director of the Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center heart and lung transplant program.
LOS ANGELES (KABC) -- A local man became the first in the country to receive a "breathing lung" transplant in mid November. A team of doctors and nurses at Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center were able to keep a set of donor lungs alive and breathing outside of the body as they're transported into the operating room.
Experts said it's a medical breakthrough that could save thousands of people who die every year waiting for a transplant.
A condition called pulmonary fibrosis was slowly hardening the lungs of 57-year-old Fernando Padilla of Alta Loma. He was tethered to his oxygen tank, hoping for a lung transplant.
"I thought it was pneumonia, I thought it was bronchitis. Nothing ever entered my head that my lungs were messed up," Padilla said. "I couldn't do nothing. I had to have everybody doing things for me."
The longtime construction worker, who helped build the very hospital he was staying in, wanted to do more. He volunteered to be part of a new clinical trial examining the delivery of living lungs.
During transport, the organ was infused with blood and oxygen, allowing them to breathe on their own.
"It maintains the donor lungs outside of a human body on a box in a near physiologic state," said Dr. Abbas Ardehali, the director of the Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center heart and lung transplant program.
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