A critically ill COVID-19 patient just got a double lung transplant

The successful
transplantation of a donor’s lungs to a severely ill COVID-19 patient may offer
others with irreversibly damaged lungs a means of survival.

A young woman whose lungs
were inflamed and scarred beyond repair because of COVID-19 has received a double lung transplant, doctors at Northwestern Memorial Hospital in Chicago
said in a news briefing June 11. It’s believed to be the first time this
procedure has been used for a coronavirus patient in the United States. Similar
transplants have been reported in Austria and China.

“If she didn’t get the
transplant, she would not be alive,” said Ankit Bharat, a thoracic surgeon at
Northwestern Feinberg School of Medicine who headed the transplant team. It’s
not clear yet how many patients whose lungs are destroyed by the coronavirus
could benefit from this approach, he said.

The Northwestern patient, a
Hispanic woman in her 20s, had no health problems before her infection. Almost
as soon as she had arrived at the hospital she needed help breathing with a
mechanical ventilator, a sign of “how sick her lungs already were,” said
Elizabeth Malsin, a pulmonary and critical care specialist at Northwestern
Memorial Hospital.

A COVID-19 infection can
cause pneumonia, leaving alveoli — the little air sacs that allow the lungs and
the blood to swap oxygen and carbon dioxide — inflamed and filled with fluid.
While some people recover from the pneumonia, others may experience long-lasting lung damage (SN: 4/27/20).
The young woman was in the intensive care unit for about six weeks. But once
she’d finally cleared the virus, the damage unleashed by the virus had obliterated
the alveoli.

“Once the lungs get permanently damaged they just don’t get better,” Bharat says.  “We don’t have enough medications to get them back.” The June 5 double lung transplant took about 10 hours — a few hours longer than is usual — because the dense scarring in the patient’s lungs left them stuck to surrounding structures, Bharat said. But she is improving every day, he said, and has been able to FaceTime with her family. “Yesterday she smiled and told me … ‘Doc, thank you for not giving up on me.’”