Word: livers
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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There was also the problem of the bile ducts. The donor liver had come with its gall bladder and ducts attached. Rather than attempt a dangerously delicate joining of the common duct to the duodenum, Moore decided to attach the new gall bladder itself to the duodenum, allowing the bile to bypass the common duct. The entire operation took eight hours. Not until Tommy Gorence was sitting up and eating well, apparently making a good recovery, did the Brigham publicize the case. Tommy made good progress for four weeks, then ran into difficulties with a lung infection, a common complication...
Less Suppression. Denver, where the first such operation was performed in March 1963 by the University of Colorado's Dr. Thomas E. Starzl, remains the liver-transplant capital of the world, with six recipients surviving. The early operations five years ago, says Starzl, were tragic. Although surgeons were sure that the procedure would work, the longest survival among the first patients was 23 days. In most cases, death resulted from infection, to which the patients were especially susceptible because of generous use of drugs to suppress the mechanism by which the body rejects foreign protein...
...serum or globulin extracted from horses into which human white blood cells had been injected (TIME, July 26). Only when the technique was developed satisfactorily did he begin transplanting again. In his second series, Starzl operated last year on Julie Rodriguez, now 21, who suffered from cancer of the liver. Julie has had to be readmitted for additional treatment, but has now survived for a record twelve months. Starzl has no hope of curing her cancer, which has spread. What is certain is that Julie has an effectively functioning transplanted liver. Starzl has also discharged two-year-old Randell Wayne...
...other Denver patients have died, after as long as five months following surgery, from a variety of complications usually involving blood clotting. In no case has it been clear that rejection of the transplanted liver was the single direct cause of death. "If a patient can make it for six or eight months," says Starzl, "he has a good chance of living a very long time." Without a liver, for which there is no artificial substitute, no one can live longer than about 36 hours...
...aircraft repairman at Travis Air Force Base in California was admitted to the base hospital with severe malaise and nausea and passing dark urine. Liver function was abnormal, and a laboratory examination showed evidence of infectious hepatitis. Within 24 hours, not only the man's wife but all their eight children had telltale symptoms of hepatitis. A team of Air Force medics headed by Major Ralph D. Reynolds reports in the Archives of Internal Medicine that the virtually certain source was water leaking from the freeze balls. The water also carried whooping-cough germs, an amoeba and four species...