(Newser)
– Surgeons in Japan say they have performed a first operation of this type that will give hope to coronavirus patients with severe lung damage. In the world’s first living donor lung tissue transplant to a COVID patient, a woman who had spent months in a life support machine received healthy tissue transplants from her husband and son, CNN reports. Doctors say the woman’s lungs were no longer functional and she needed a lung transplant to live, but because organ donations from dead patients to the brain are rare in Japan, it could have been years before there was a organ available.
“I think there is a lot of hope in this treatment in the sense that it creates a new option,” said Hiroshi Date, the surgeon in charge of the operation, for Kyodo News. The woman received part of her husband’s right lung and part of her son’s left lung. The husband and son, who accepted the risk of decreased lung function, are in stable condition and the woman is expected to leave the hospital after two months. Doctors say the woman, whose name has not been released, had no pre-existing conditions before a coronavirus infection shattered her lungs late last year. (In the United States last year, a double lung transplant saved the life of a COVID patient in his 20s).