Hacker News Reader

Comment by jart | Hacker News Reader

[flagged]

Source? This seems hard to believe and google isn't pulling anything like it up.

It's not true at all. A cardioplegia solution is injected into the heart itself to arrest the heartbeat, and to protect it from tissue damage while awaiting transplantation. But this is done after the donor's chest has already been surgically opened, and has nothing at all to do with "paralyzing" them or preventing them from struggling. If they were going to struggle, surely they would do so when the operation started! But no such paralysis is needed, of course, because the donor has already been determined to be brain-dead by that point.

As an interesting note, even the basic premise of the preceding comment is not accurate. A small but increasing number of heart transplants are performed as DCD operations, which means the donor's heart stops naturally on its own before being removed: https://www.acc.org/Latest-in-Cardiology/Articles/2022/11/21...

sorry, so the heart is still beating in the dead donor? The doctors harvesting the heart stops the donors heart from beating? I have to be missing something here. You cannot be saying that doctors stop the donors heart from beating (kill them) before taking the heart.

As poster above you states, they are clinically dead at the point the heart is removed. Their brain has stopped functioning. There is no coming back. They are a meat popsicle.

When they remove the donor heart, the donor's body will die no matter what. How did you think a heart transplant worked? That's why, as others have said, it's only done when the donor is already legally and medically dead, even though their heart is beating.

It is technically possible to artificially keep the heart beating during the transplant process, but that's a very recent technical development and a much more difficult surgical procedure. So stopping the heart first is normal.

A stopped heart doesn't necessarily mean a person's dead, a beating heart doesn't mean their alive.

If you’re a heart donor, you have been diagnosed as “brain dead”. This means that even though your heart is still beating and you’re drawing breath, your ECG is a flatline, and there is no hope of recovery (with our current medical technology)

That means that your grieving next of kin have decided (for you, since you no longer have conscious thoughts) that your last act on this planet will be an act of kindness. You will give your heart, lungs, eyes, etc to someone that can still make use of them. The last thing you will do, is saving the life of someone.

So yes, they (directly or indirectly) stop the heart.

And that is a good thing.

Sounds like an offshoot of one of those Death Panel conspiracy theories

Reply on news.ycombinator.com