This year marks the 40th anniversary of the first successful heart-lung double transplant for a pulmonary hypertension patient in the United Kingdom by legendary thoracic surgeon Prof. Magdi Yacoub.
In the early 1980s, after the successful introduction of the immunosuppressive drug cyclosporin A, Prof. Magdi Yacoub sought to push the boundaries of cardiac surgery. In 1983, he took on a patient, Lars Ljungberg, who was deemed a lost cause even by American experts. Ljungberg, a 33-year-old Swedish sports journalist, suffered from pulmonary hypertension, which had severely damaged his lungs and heart. Yacoub determined that Ljungberg’s only chance at survival was a heart-lung transplant, a procedure he had never performed before. This would mark the first heart-lung transplant in Europe.
Read the story of this amazing feat on the Reader’s Digest at this link
Cover photo by National Cancer Institute on Unsplash
Veteran journalists Simon Pearson and Fiona Gorman have recently published a biography titled “A Surgeon and a Maverick: The Life and Pioneering Work of Magdi Yacoub”.
Photo of book cover: Amazon