Cardiac Cath with Angioplasty. OPERATION: Heart Transplant. The first human heart transplant was performed in Cape Town, South Africa, in 1967.
The 54-year-old patient survived for just 18 days following the surgery. In the five years that followed that first operation, several a hundred transplants were performed, but each with very little success: Only 15 percent of patients survived even a year after the procedure, and few of those survived longer than that. The greatest hurdle to successful heart transplantation in those early days was the patient's own immune response, which caused the body to reject the foreign organ.
Today, doctors have greatly improved the rate of transplant success, using drugs that suppress the patient's immune response. Despite advances in transplantation medicine, however, the availability of human hearts suitable for transplanting remains quite low. The Human Heart: An Online Exploration from The Franklin Institute, made possible by Unisys. Your browser does not support JavaScript.
<a title='RSS-to-JavaScript.com: Free RSS to JavaScript Converter' href= to read the latest news</a>. From the moment it begins beating until the moment it stops, the human heart works tirelessly. In an average lifetime*, the heart beats more than two and a half billion times, without ever pausing to rest. Map of the Human Heart. From the Heart.