WASHINGTON (AP) — Two university hospitals are pioneering new ways to expand access to the lifesaving heart transplants for adults and babies. They aim to overcome some barriers to retrieving hearts donated after circulatory death, when the heart stops beating after withdrawal of life support. Surgeons at Duke and Vanderbilt universities say they’ve separately devised some simpler approaches. In the New England Journal of Medicine, they describe small but early successes, transplanting an infant at Duke and three men at Vanderbilt. These are the kinds of transplantable hearts that too often aren’t retrieved depending on how would-be organ donors die.
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