College Student First to Survive Rare Heart Removal Operation

HOUSTON —  A 20-year-old college student is the first known person to survive a rare operation in which surgeons completely removed his heart, cut out a malignant tumor, then reimplanted the repaired organ into his body.

Guy Altmann had a tumor removed from his left shoulder in August, but doctors told him three months later that they hadn’t gotten it all. After he suffered a stroke in March, he was told that he had a lemon-sized tumor popping in and out of his left mitral valve as he breathed.

A team of Houston doctors performed the heart-removing surgery in a six-hour procedure Monday.

Although he was running a fever Friday, Altmann, an electrical engineering major at Texas A&M; University, was in good condition.

The technique has been done only a handful of times on patients with malignant tumors, and none has been known to survive, said Dr. Michael J. Reardon, chief of heart and chest surgery for Methodist Hospital and Baylor College of Medicine, who helped perform the “autotransplant” procedure.

But Altmann had little choice. “I think he would have died within the next two to three weeks,” Reardon said.

Altmann’s heart was stopped with chemicals, removed and put into a bucket of ice and water, where the tumor, called a fibrous histiocytoma, was cut away.

The damaged valve was then replaced by one made of swine tissue, and the damaged wall of the chamber, where the tumor had been attached, was rebuilt using tissue from a cow’s pericardium, the sac that contains the heart.