The first multi-organ harvest from a controlled heart-stopping donor was performed in Sardinia: the operation dates back to last Friday, October 11, at the Santissima Annunziata in Sassari. The procedure, which allowed the implantation of livers and kidneys destined for patients waiting in Rome and Padua, was carried out on the basis of the national heart-stopping donation program of the Cnt - Istituto Superiore di Sanità - already adopted in several regions and started this year also on the Island.
"Promising new prospects are opening up in the transplant sector in Sardinia too: this procedure allows us to expand the number of potential donors, helping to satisfy the demand of Sardinian patients waiting for a transplant on our island, and at the same time strengthening the national exchange network": this is what Health Councillor Armando Bartolazzi, promoter of the resolution that recently gave the green light to the establishment of the protocol, said.
"Stopped-heart donation is an innovative technique, already present in the most advanced settings in our country and which now places our region among the national points of reference in the sector. Sardinia has long had a consolidated background in the transplant field, which has allowed us to identify Brotzu and the Sassari University Hospital as two points of reference for the introduction of a new, highly complex technique which , just a few months after the approval of the regional executive, is already a reality".
Donation after a heart attack is an organ donation program from a deceased donor that is carried out by subjects who have died from cardiac arrest and have been subjected to death certification using cardiological criteria (Donor after Circulatory Death - DCD), unlike donors who have died from brain death, a program that has been regularly carried out on the island for years, in which death certification is carried out using neurological criteria (Donor after Brain Death - DBD). A peculiar aspect of the donation with a stopped heart is given by the certification of death with cardiological criteria that in Italy can only occur after twenty minutes of cardiac arrest recorded with an electrocardiogram, therefore, to avoid that the organs may be affected by the so-called systolic warm ischemia (that is, the phase in which the circulation is stopped and the organs are in place, but not perfused by blood circulation, neither physiological, nor artificial, nor supported by cardiopulmonary resuscitation maneuvers),
