• Question: can someone survive without a heart

    Asked by billalbadman123 to Ben, James, Jen, Michael, Susanna on 14 Mar 2013.
    • Photo: Susanna Martin

      Susanna Martin answered on 14 Mar 2013:

      I didn’t know the answer to this so I had a quick google and found a couple of news articles that suggest it is possible!
      http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/02/jakub-halik-czech-man-lived-without-heart-artificial-heart-six-months_n_1932880.html
      http://www.reuters.com/article/2008/11/19/us-usa-transplant-idUSTRE4AI7I120081119

      It looks like it is possible to replace the heart with a mechanical pump, but that ideally you’d want a donor heart so using a mechanical heart is temporary. You would also need the surgeons to be prepared, a lot of planning would go into this kind of surgery so it’s unlikely you’d be able to replace the heart of somebody who suddenly had a heart attack.

    • Photo: Michael Craig

      Michael Craig answered on 14 Mar 2013:

      Good question. The heart is vital to our survival, if the heart stops, the blood supply to the brain stops and we can die very quickly if the heart isn’t started again. We can’t survive without something to pump blood around our body, this doesn’t have to be a heart though. When people are having a heart transplant they get hooked up to a machine which pumps blood around their body for them while the surgeons are swapping the persons heart for a new one. This is called a cardiopulmonary bypass. This not only pumps the blood around the body but it also oxygenates the blood to take oxygen to the brain etc. So we can sort of survive without a heart, but only when we have a machine doing the job of the heart!

      Thanks,
      Michael

    • Photo: Jen Todd Jones

      Jen Todd Jones answered on 14 Mar 2013:

      Unfortunately not billalbadman, the hear pumps fresh blood full of oxygen around the body and it powers out brain and muscles and the rest of our organs. Without it we could not survive, in fact without a heart we would die almost straight away – if the heart is still in the body but not beating then we would live for around three minutes.

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