woman
King Faisal Specialist Hospital and Research Center in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, announced here today that it has successfully performed an operation to transplant two lungs at the same time for a thirty-year-old Saudi woman. The consultant cardiothoracic surgery and lung transplantation at the hospital, Dr. Iskandar Sulaiman Al-Guthmi, said in a statement: The operation, which is the third of its kind in the Middle East, took six continuous hours, and was carried out with the help of pure Saudi medical and nursing staff. He explained that the patient had suffered from severe pulmonary failure in the lungs for many years, and it was difficult, however, to continue treatment with the usual medications for such cases. This required two lungs to be transplanted simultaneously, obtained from a brain-dead patient, after verifying the matching of the species and tissues with the patient. Al-Guthmi pointed out that the operation, which is the third to be performed at the Specialty Hospital in Jeddah, noted that lung transplantation operations in the world in general are considered medically complicated operations. Due to the small number of donors, the surgical complexity and the high costs involved. He suggested that lung transplants began in 1963, when the immunodepressant drug (cyclosporine) was discovered, which helps prevent rejection of the transplanted lung. In 1983, he recorded the world''s first successful single lung transplant on a Canadian patient.
