Pa. girl who took on donor rules gets adult lungs

**DHF** Wed Jun 12, 2013 2:05 pm

PHILADELPHIA —
A family spokeswoman says the lungs being implanted in a 10-year-old Pennsylvania girl at the center of a debate on organ donation are from an adult.
Sarah Murnaghan, who suffers from severe cystic fibrosis, is receiving her new lungs at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia.
No other details about the donor are known, including whether they came through the regular donor system or through public appeals.

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**DHF** Sun Jun 16, 2013 3:49 pm

Pa. girl's controversial lung transplant surgery successful

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If all goes well, patients usually spend one to two days in intensive care and another two weeks in the hospital, he says. But "some patients can spend months in the hospital recovering if there are complications."
A lot of physical therapy and rehabilitation are necessary after the transplant, Shah says.
He says overall the chance of death within 30 days of lung transplant is as low as 5% in most experienced centers. The one-year survival rate is 80% to 90% depending on the center and the complexity of the patients being operated on, Shah says.
About half of patients live to about five years after surgery, and a third make it for 10 years, he says.
Art Caplan, head of the division of medical ethics at New York University Langone Medical Center, told USA TODAY, "Adult lungs don't fit well in children's bodies, and that makes it hard to transplant them. You are looking at using a piece of lung instead of a whole lung, and that makes it makes it a more difficult procedure and less likely to work.
"Lung transplants are a difficult operation, and they do fail," he says.
"It doesn't work all that well compared to other kinds of transplants. That's partly because when you transplant lungs, you have to give immunosuppressive medication so that they don't reject the lung. That opens up the lungs to infection. The lungs are constantly exposed to viruses and bacteria, so infection is a huge problem with lung transplants," Caplan says.

Pa. girl who took on donor rules gets adult lungs

Pa. girl who took on donor rules gets adult lungs

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