Pig To Human Heart Transplants 'Possible Within Three Years' (theguardian.com) 83
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Adapted pig hearts could be transplanted into patients within three years, according to a report citing the surgeon who pioneered heart transplantation in the UK. On the 40th anniversary of the first successful heart transplant, Sir Terence English told The Sunday Telegraph that his protege from that operation would try to replace a human kidney with a pig's this year. "If the result of xenotransplantation is satisfactory with porcine kidneys to humans, then it is likely that hearts would be used with good effects in humans within a few years," the 87-year-old said. "If it works with a kidney, it will work with a heart. That will transform the issue." The anatomy and physiology of a pig's heart is similar to that of a human's, so they are used as models for developing new treatments.
oh I thought it was human to pig (Score:3)
Here I was hoping for clinically obese pigs with vast amounts of yummy bacon to be supported by a succession of human heart transplants
That would interfere with the supply of bacon. (Score:2)
It's not like most humans have hearts; you obviously don't follow the news.
Soon, all those people in cages will BE yummy Bacon.
Soylent Bacon . . . ? (Score:2)
Here I was hoping for clinically obese pigs with vast amounts of yummy bacon to be supported by a succession of human heart transplants
I would be worried, that if I started putting pig parts in me, that I might wake up in the middle of the night, hungry, and would be tempted to cut out some parts of me, and toss them into the frying pan.
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Long pig has been a traditional dish in the Caribbean islands for a long time...
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yeah but that's *other* long pigs, not the long pig one resides in
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Somewhere out there... Dick Cheney... (Score:2)
...is mumbling into his fifth cheeseburger since breakfast "Three more years, three more years..."
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Missed headline opportunity (Score:5, Funny)
Clearly should be re-written as:
"Farm to... Operating Table"!
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A kid who liked to bully me in middle school ended up a meth addict. Sometimes he asks me for spare change when I walk by, it always brings me a laugh.
Anyways, he used so much drugs he had to get a new heart valve. From a pig. But he's still a tweaker, so it will only buy him a few years.
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Poor guy. His parents must have fucked him up thoroughly...
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His parents must have fucked him up thoroughly...
Bad parents never see it that way. They'll blame the kid's friends, the schools, video games, violence on TV, etc.
Everything, except themselves.
They can't be the reason.
Re: Missed headline opportunity (Score:2)
Sounds like you too are a bully and a hypocrite.
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LOL you brought me a laugh, too, because you're obviously a former childhood bully whose life sucks now.
And no, the world doesn't owe you free drugs.
There is free food available every day of the week. Beggars don't need to beg. There is no excuse for adults doing it. It is just pathetic. It won't provide you housing, it won't help you get back on your feet, and it isn't even an enjoyable way to spend time. Beggars are pathetic.
If you live in a country with a caste system, maybe beggars are expected to beg.
Re: Missed headline opportunity (Score:2)
Why would drugs lead him to need a new heart valve? There's no way in hell you could determine that with any reasonable degree of actually. Eventually everybody you know who has a heart murmur may need some kind of heart valve operation at some point in their lives. That's usually an artifact of birth. Most people don't even know when they have valvular problems until surgery is needed.
I personally get irritated when somebody attributes one of my behaviors to why I needed a kidney transplant (not a single p
Re: Missed headline opportunity (Score:2)
That doesn't lead to valvular heart disease
What if you eat bacon? (Score:3, Funny)
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They provided faith related guidance to their communities for every advancement in medical care.
Look over the faiths that reject all animal products in medicine?
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If you had a transplant from a pig, would it become cannibalism to eat bacon?
I know if I had a transplant from a pig, I'd stop eating pork and bacon just to be sure...
I'd eat people instead.
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It's a survival strategy. Most people, when put in that sort of situation, chow down on the dead. The ones who don't chow down, don't live to tell the tale.
Religion (Score:3)
Re:Religion (Score:5, Interesting)
Whether or not hard-line, stubborn, fundamentalist, conservative boneheads will throw their lives away anyway, like Jehovah's Witnesses sometimes do with blood transfusions, is yet to be seen. Far as I'm concerned, provided no minors die for their parents' superstitions, it's their bodies and their funeral.
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The fact that Jews are forbidden to eat pork in no way impacts other uses of pig parts. There's no Kosher issues involved here.
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Actual successful transplants to date: Zero.
Not signing up immediately (if you are religious): Boneheaded.
Slashdot "unbiased" logic.
Re:Religion (Score:4, Insightful)
Rejecting a medical procedure because it is unproven and/or risky? Sane.
Rejecting a medical procedure because it might offend your imaginary buddy? Insane.
See the difference? Good.
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My "buddy" is not imaginary, and I know that as a fact.
And no, the fact you don't know something does not mean nobody else does. You don't have those psychic powers to review everyone else's experiences, even if you want to make that lunatic claim.
In any case, you've moved the goalposts, the original post addressed nothing about the evaluation of the risk, simply asserting that religious people are "boneheaded" regardless of their reasoning.
But, then, that's what two legged animals do, with or without dire
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Well, next time you two have a chat can you tell him he's a moron? He should know why.
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You can tell him yourself. Try first without the irreplicable by human technology and billions of research dollars, intelligent speech capability you were given that you have not the slightest capability to create.
If you find that not noteworthy, well, pigs and hominids are useful for a lot of things. Just state your position earlier rather than later, thanks.
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My "buddy" is not imaginary, and I know that as a fact.
Nope, you don't. You have just convinced yourself that you do.
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Doubling down to stating a Bare Assertion Fallacy derived from your psychic powers, I see.
Meanwhile, I'll just go ahead and continue to know.
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Doubling down to stating a Bare Assertion Fallacy derived from your psychic powers, I see.
Nope. If it's a "fact" then it's observable ("something that has actual existence"). Care to point to the actual observations of your sky buddy?
Yep. Exactly. There are none.
Re:Religion (Score:4, Insightful)
Okay, I have a limited time to fix your uneducated epistemology. You can "observe" something. You cannot "observe" that nobody else has observed something. That's a claim to psychic powers.
And, rather than "none", let's just outright refute your further lunatic psychic claims to know what everyone across all time has or has not observed, and start by giving many cases, as peer reviewed in the most authoritative medical journal in the world [thelancet.com].
Have more claims to just make up out of nothing, equally formally impossible for you to know?
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So you're in essence believing that a subjective near-death experience has created the world and prohibits people from wearing mixed fibers and eating pork. Need I say that it shows that you need some psychiatric help?
Please do show me an entity capable of creating worlds, setting pure water on fire and resurrecting the dead people. And si
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Amusing that you'd think I'd care about your "bar". You're a pointless valueless internet troll, by his own admission and demand, doomed to elimination and total irrelevancy. Your opinion is of no -possible- importance, even according to you.
I do, though, hope before then you gain some basic capability for rational thought.
Firstly, your word-salad thinking aside, it is not the NDE experience that I'm proposing created the universe, any more than by saying if a hypothesis predicts a result (religion being
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I do, though, hope before then you gain some basic capability for rational thought.
You are incapable of it as you're demonstrating over and over again. Let me be short: you are entitled to your own believes, you are not entitled to your own facts.
Your need to do the standard atheist absurdity of conflating "facts" with "facts reproduced for me" is also tiresome and trivially refuted.
Let me quote the dictionary for you, since you're apparently are an idiot: "Something that is known to have happened or to exist, especially something for which proof exists, or about which there is information" (Oxford). Your belief in a god does not meet any of these bars.
In general, religion is just an intellectual cowardice, nothing more. I
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Doing something for no good reason is boneheaded. And no, "because my book written by some people without any knowledge says so" is no good reason.
Who's the bigger fool, the fool who writes bullshit in a book or the fool who takes it serious?
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Well, except they have knowledge.
Go ahead, try to equally predict the upper lifespan of all of mankind, for the next 4,000 years. You get the entirety of human knowledge at your fingertips on the Internet for formulating your prediction, the "nomad" had nothing--except, of course, God. Go.
And, even a cursory awareness of scripture and current events will make one aware of extensive predictive parallels with Revelation.
Historical sequences demonstrates many already fulfilled predictions, as well, should yo
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Many people have claimed that the predictions of Nostradamus are accurate, and give examples. The examples don't correlate very well among those people, nor do they correlate very well as time passes and more history accumulates.
Revelations is gibberish, the silliest book in the Bible and as reliable as the Koran.
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Predict ANYTHING based on the bible and let's see how it pans out. All the religious prophecies were fulfilled in the same chapter that made them (or shoehorned into it in a way that makes Nostradamus look like a credible source for future events). That's like me writing a book where I predict that Pearl Harbor is going to be bombed in 1941. Look at me, I can predict great events!
Science CAN actually make predictions about the future. That's basically what good scientific theories do. They can describe the
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My "buddy" is not imaginary, and I know that as a fact.
And no, the fact you don't know something does not mean nobody else does. You don't have those psychic powers to review everyone else's experiences, even if you want to make that lunatic claim.
The alleged entity is accessible only through internal, subjective mental processes, entirely within yourself. That's a pretty fair definition of "imaginary".
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So is 90% of human experience, e.g. love, hate, patriotism, aesthetics, etc. Fail.
If you can't acknowledge that, refer to the peer reviewed NDE study from the Lancet previously for additional refutation of your claim.
Also notable is that your claim to psychic powers isn't any more valid than the others'. You don't know what the empirical experiences of everyone on Earth across all history have or have not been. Period.
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Empiric: your nickname is ironic.
Perhaps you'd like to provide some scientifically acceptable evidence.
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My "buddy" is not imaginary, and I know that as a fact.
If it's a "fact" then that means you can prove it.
Go ahead.
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Most people who hear voices in their head recognise that they're delusional. Clearly you're not one who recognises that, which makes you more dangerous - mostly to yourself.
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Does this put you at risk of porcine disease? (Score:3, Insightful)
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"my heart is sweeter than bacon, child!" (Score:2)
Honey Boo Boo: I'm gonna tell them "my heart is sweeter than bacon, child!"
I can smell truffles! (Score:2)
Free transplants! Just sign here...for one year of slaving as truffle hunter human!
Ok, I'd still do it if it was my life on the line. No questions asked.
Lack of medical history? (Score:3)
I once read a book about medical history of all kinds of breakthroughs, from the first haemodialysis over all kinds of transplants.
And I seem to remember that experiments with pig hearts have already been done in the past, but that the problem is that they are not so tough as human hearts. They start to deform.
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And I seem to remember that experiments with pig hearts have already been done in the past, but that the problem is that they are not so tough as human hearts. They start to deform.
Interesting, I had not read that before. I am aware that one of the major restrictions with using pig hearts for transplant is that pigs grow much faster than humans do, hence you can't use piglet hearts in children and/or adolescents as the heart will rapidly outgrow its attachments. I'd also be concerned about longevity, as a 'ripe old age' for a pig is only 20 years - though I guess if you're dying due to heart problems any extra years are a bonus.
Doesn't seem like that big of a leap. . . (Score:2)
There's plenty of people walking around with porcine (and bovine) aortic heart valves. . . why not a full heart?
WTF?!? (Score:3)
First TFA talks about a heart xenotransplant from pig to human, then a kidney, then talks about a gene therapy first tested in pigs. In the last sentence, after gushing about the results of the gene therapy in pigs it casually mentions that all subjects died from the treatment because the gene wouldn't stop when the job was done...
I'm thinking TFA smells more of rat than bacon.
Re: WTF?!? (Score:2)
Can't tell if the cure is worse than the disease. Anyone else want to try it out first?
(Maybe 'want' is a strong word.)
Re: WTF?!? (Score:1)
People who need a heart transplant will grasp at anything the other people on their health care plan will pay for.
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Whereas you would just off yourself on the grounds that it's more cost effective?
I would suspect that most people would choose not to have the procedure (mortality 89%) rather than have the therapy (mortality 100%)..
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How about (Score:1)
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Not saying I need one but looking forward to see other organ transplants from horses to humans.
Why not get that from a pig too? Pigs have corkscrew shaped ones! Spiraled for her pleasure.
Or then there are ducks which expand like crazy.
6 inch long banana long slugs can grow pseudo ones that grow 36 inches long.
Horses just sound boring to me.
lifespan of a pig (Score:5, Interesting)
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Hmmm...if you're 85, your averate life expectancy is about six years. So, the pig valve in her heart put her pretty much in line with the general populace (she'
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I don't know how true that is any more.
We have a family friend who was around 45 when he received a pig valve 7-8 years ago and was told it was good for 12 years at which point he would have to get a replacement. He was given the option of an artificial valve, but with that he couldn't drink to excess (which apparently was his big requirement for the valve).
Most of the people I hear about now are being given the transcatheter aortic valve replacement which has a very short recovery time (on the order of da
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I don't know how true that is any more.
We have a family friend who was around 45 when he received a pig valve 7-8 years ago and was told it was good for 12 years at which point he would have to get a replacement. He was given the option of an artificial valve, but with that he couldn't drink to excess (which apparently was his big requirement for the valve).
Most of the people I hear about now are being given the transcatheter aortic valve replacement which has a very short recovery time (on the order of days) and a good lifespan.
I don't know how much you can drink with the Transcatheter aortic valve replacement.
So if you drink like a pig, you might need to have a heart like a pig too.
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That makes sense on multiple levels.
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The lifespan of a healthy domestic pig is about 6 to 10 years. Would a successfully transplanted pig heart last much longer than that?
No. Planned obsolescence by the doctors and insurance companies. Remember, there's always a conspiracy somewhere if you keep looking around long enough.
First started with light bulbs, so I believe. Someone made a _great long lasting_ light bulb and then noticed sales dropping over time. They soon changed their manufacturing procedure ever-so-slightly for no, NO REASON at all.
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First started with light bulbs, so I believe. Someone made a _great long lasting_ light bulb and then noticed sales dropping over time. They soon changed their manufacturing procedure ever-so-slightly for no, NO REASON at all.
Here's the whole story [npr.org], and it's worse than you think. It was all the light bulb manufacturers getting together and changing them all at the same time. With punishments built into the agreement in case anyone built bulbs that lasted too long.
but where? (Score:2)
Identifying recipients... (Score:2)
Things might get awkward at breakfast meetings if somebody was suddenly overcome with a need to screw their bacon instead of eating it.
Hmm (Score:2)
I mean, I'm sure that the doctors/scientists involved with this have thought about it, but I wonder what the useful lifespan of such a heart is? I mean a human can live 70-100 years. Pigs usually live no more than 10 years.
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I mean, I'm sure that the doctors/scientists involved with this have thought about it, but I wonder what the useful lifespan of such a heart is? I mean a human can live 70-100 years. Pigs usually live no more than 10 years.
I'd rather get a 10 year extension to my life than die prematurely because they can't find a human donor. Also, usually when you require a heart transplant you are probably quite far into your natural lifespan anyway. A pig's heart won't have to last you 70 years most likely.
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Arrogant (Score:2)
How gloriously arrogant.
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And belly2belly too (Score:2)
Well why not? Humans have been transplanting pig thighs to human bellies for millenia.
They're pretty similar (Score:2)
I've lead a number of heart dissections on pig hearts, aiming to educate on the human heart. They're pretty close anatomically. Pigs seem to have more anatomical variation than people, however: tricuspid valves being semilunar, crazy overincorporated pulmonary veins, etc. Pig hearts are also bigger, which brings other issues.