Top honor to cardiologist for advancing heart transplant medicine

Stanford School of Medicine | John Sanford


Photo: Cardiologist Sharon Hunt received in April a lifetime achievement award from the International Society for Heart and Lung Transplantation

How do you keep a heart-transplant recipient alive and healthy for the long term?

That was the challenge taking shape by the mid-1970s, when Sharon Hunt, MD, was a cardiology fellow at Stanford Hospital. Meeting that challenge has since defined her career and earned her one of the most prestigious awards in the field of heart-transplantation medicine: the International Society for Heart and Lung Transplantation award for lifetime achievement, which she accepted in April in Prague.

“It’s the biggest honor I’ve ever had,” Hunt said.

Hunt arrived at Stanford as a first-year medical student in the fall of 1967. A few months later, Stanford cardiac surgeon Norman Shumway, MD, and his team performed the first adult human heart transplantation in the United States. The success of that feat (the patient survived 14 days) inspired other heart surgeons across the nation to try their hand at the operation. However, most recipients survived just a few weeks or months, and an unofficial moratorium on the procedure went into effect in 1970. Over the next decade, Shumway’s team, which ignored the moratorium, made steady progress in refining its surgical techniques, introducing the heart biopsy for assessment of acute organ rejection and determining the viability of hearts procured and then transported to a transplant center. By 1974, 40 percent of their patients were living for two years, and 26 percent were making it to three years.

Read more: http://med.stanford.edu/ism/2012/may/hunt-0521.html

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