美国女孩德扎娜•西蒙斯因患有罕见心脏疾病，不得不接受两次心脏移植手术。在两次手术之间，西蒙斯靠体外人工心脏成功存活118天。14岁的西蒙斯19日病愈出院，她的母亲瓦拉•安德森把这称为“最不可思议的医学奇迹”。西蒙斯目前恢复良好。但一般接受心脏移植手术的病人需要在12年至13年后更换新的心脏。西蒙斯接下来只需长期服用抗排异药物，来保证植入心脏正常工作。除此之外，她完全可以像同龄人一样参加各种活动。

An American teenager survived for nearly four months without a heart, kept alive by a custom-built artificial blood-pumping device, until she was able to have a heart transplant, doctors in Miami said on Wednesday.

The doctors said they knew of another case in which an adult had been kept alive in Germany for nine months without a heart but said they believed this was the first time a child had survived in this manner for so long.

The patient, D'Zhana Simmons of South Carolina, said the experience of living for so long with a machine pumping her blood was "scary".

"You never knew when it would malfunction," she said, her voice barely above a whisper, at a news conference at the University of Miami/Jackson Memorial Medical Center.

"It was like I was a fake person, like I didn't really exist. I was just here," she said of living without a heart.

Simmons, 14, suffered fromdilated cardiomyopathy, a condition in which the patient's heart becomes weakened and enlarged and does not pump blood efficiently¹.

She had a heart transplant on July 2 at Miami's Holtz Children's Hospital but the new heart failed to function properly and was quickly removed.

Two heart pumps made by Thoratec Corp of Pleasanton, California, were implanted to keep her blood flowing while she fought a host of ailments² and recovered her strength. Doctors implanted another heart on Oct 29.

"She essentially³ lived for 118 days without a heart, with her circulation supported only by the two blood pumps," said Dr Marco Ricci, the hospital's director of pediatric cardiac surgery. During that time, Simmons was mobile but remained hospitalized.

When an artificial heart is used to sustain a patient, the patient's own heart is usually left in the body, doctors said.

In some cases, adult patients have been kept alive that way for more than a year, they said.

"This, we believe, is the first pediatric patient who has received such a device in this configuration⁴ without the heart, and possibly one of the youngest that has ... been bridged to transplantation without her native heart," Ricci said.

Transplant pioneer dies

Dr Adrian Kantrowitz, a cardiac surgeon who performed the first human heart transplant in the United States and who also developed lifesaving medical implants⁵, has died. He was 90.

Kantrowitz died last Friday in Ann Arbor⁶ of complications from heart failure, said his wife, Jean Kantrowitz.

In 1967, Kantrowitz performed a human heart transplant three days after the world's first was performed in South Africa.

But the transplant, on an infant who died several hours later, was only a small part of his life's work to solve the problem of heart failure, his wife said.

Adrian Kantrowitz invented and for decades continued to improve the left ventricular assist device, or LVAD, which would later lend its name to his Detroit-based research company, L-VAD Technology Inc.

The device is designed to be permanently⁷ implanted in patients with otherwise-terminal heart failure, helping⁸ their hearts circulate blood and allowing them to leave the hospital.

Kantrowitz also invented other lifesaving cardiac devices, including the intra-aortic balloon pump.

He never retired⁹, and "he never lost his mental alertness", said Jean Kantrowitz. He was an avid¹⁰ pilot, motorcyclist and sailor.