Pancreas Transplant Diabetes-Heart Failure

A retired heart and transplant surgeon who was disabled and retired in 2002 due to Graves Disease and Diabetes, who has since been a pro bono volunteer educator John Macoviak MD.

Jimmy Light MD Director of Transplantation at the Washington Hospital Center and John Macoviak MD assisted lead surgeon Dr. Professor Hans Sollinger MD Chairman of Transplantation at the University of Wisconsin who had been reviewing this case for many weeks and was flown in from the University of Wisconsin in the the first in the world's first combined Pancreas Heart Transplant in Washington DC.

Several have been done by others subsequently with long-term survivors.

John Macoviak MD was trained by the worlds most famous highly esteemed and dominating cardiac surgeon legends in many minds in that era the mid 1980's. They included Doctors. Norman E. Shumway MD PhD,, Edward B. Stinson MD, Philip E. Oyer MD PhD, D. Craig Miller MD, Stuart Jamieson MB, , R Scott Mitchell MD, John C. Baldwin MD Rhodes Scholar, James B.D. Mark MD, along with Co-Chief Residents Bill Frist MD, Chris C.G. MacGregor MD, Vaughn Starnes MD, John Dein MD and Carlos Moreno Cabral MD. He established the Washington Regional Heart Transplant Consortium and performed the first 30 heart transplants in Washington DC.

The patient who received the new heart and pancreas was a longtime diabetic with progressive heart failure in the weeks leading up to the surgery. At the time, a pancreas transplant was viewed as a compassionate experimental procedure, and is usually targeted at diabetics whose pancreases fail to produce enough insulin. Diabetics usually require daily injections of insulin; however, in severe cases, the disease often progresses and destroys the kidney. However, in this particular case, the patient’s heart was the main organ affected.

The operation took about six hours.. The patient was a prominent U.S. Government scientist. He would not have survived without these surgeries and the doctors determined that only a heart transplant would not have sufficed; the pancreas transplant was necessary for the patient’s potential survival. The heart functioned well but the pancreas never worked likely due to organ rejection.