On this episode of Advances in Care, host Erin Welsh talks to Dr. Andrew Goldstone, pediatric cardiac surgeon at NewYork-Presbyterian and Columbia, about the groundbreaking heart transplant that saved the lives of three separate children. It was the first time doctors at NewYork-Presbyterian Morgan Stanley Children’s Hospital performed a split-root domino partial heart transplant. In this procedure, one child was transplanted with a new heart and their original heart was used to donate living pulmonary and aortic valves to two separate recipients in need.

Dr. Goldstone, his colleague Dr. David Kalfa, and the rest of the team at NewYork-Presbyterian and Columbia had previous experience with a handful of domino partial heart transplants where one patient is transplanted with a new heart and another receives a valve from the explanted heart. Those experiences helped prepare for the split-root domino, which took nearly 24 hours of extremely coordinated care. In addition to their efforts to increase the number of domino heart transplants being done, physician-researchers at the institution are leading new studies that are also helping improve living valve procurement and storage, allowing more children to receive heart valves that will grow with them and require less surgeries.

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