New Treatment for Heart Transplant Hopefuls

An experimental treatment is giving desperately ill heart patients a new lease on life.

Last Resort

Jim Blevins and Gail Keller were heart patients who'd run out of time. They had literally no options left -- until they volunteered for an experimental procedure, hoping, at least, to help others.

Blevins faced a catch-22 situation in 2004 when he learned that he needed a transplant to survive but wasn't sick enough to qualify for a new heart. His heart problems had started a decade earlier, when he was 42 years old and working as a truck driver for a bread company in Ohio. After work and on weekends, Blevins liked to kick back and coach the local girls' softball team. But he'd been feeling sluggish and exhausted. At the urging of his wife, Janet, he went to his family doctor. His EKG was abnormal, and he was rushed to a cardiologist and then to the ICU.

"That really scared me," Blevins says. "After they did all sorts of tests, a doctor told me I'd had a heart attack. And I hadn't even realized it."

The next morning, Janet and the couple's three daughters were by his side as he was wheeled to the OR for bypass surgery. Because the heart attack had done so much damage, Blevins had to spend a month in the hospital, followed by five more months of outpatient rehabilitation, before he was well enough to start to pick up his life again.

Blevins had no complications for ten years, and then he began to experience shortness of breath and angina, chest pain that strikes when the heart is starved of oxygen-rich blood. He was headed for another heart attack or even sudden death. "I was in constant pain. On a scale of one to ten, it was a six," he says. "I was so short of breath, I couldn't walk from the back door of a grocery store to the bread rack without having to stop and rest.

"When I went to the heart doctor, he said there was nothing more he could do because my arteries were too clogged to put in any more bypasses. He told me I might only live another five years. I was 52 and thought my life was over. My wife and kids were scared to death that they'd lose me. And I was terrified too."

His doctor told him that a heart transplant might help him survive for up to ten years. To see if he qualified, in 2004 Blevins consulted Lynne Wagoner, MD, then director of cardiac services at the University Hospital in Cincinnati. "Jim was what some doctors call a no-option patient," says Dr. Wagoner. "All the conventional treatments had been exhausted, but he didn't meet the criteria for a transplant. There's a shortage of donor organs, and patients have to be so sick that they're on their deathbed to qualify. Many people die while they're waiting for a new heart."

Gail Keller, also a patient of Dr. Wagoner's, was in the same deadly predicament. The 35-year-old from New Paris, Ohio, suffered from an inherited disorder that causes extremely high levels of cholesterol to build up in the blood. It can lead to severe heart disease or sudden death.

Keller was only 16, and a three-sport athlete, when she had a heart attack while doing jumping jacks. By the time she was 19, she had undergone triple-bypass surgery.

"My doctors said I'd never see 21, because they didn't think my arteries would stay open," says Keller. But she remained healthy long enough to graduate from college, earn a master's degree and settle into a career as a rehabilitation counselor for the disabled. "Every year was scary because I felt like I was living on borrowed time."

When Keller turned 33, she got so sick that she had to quit her job and move in with her parents. "Pretty much anything I did brought on chest pain, shortness of breath and terrible fatigue," she says. "It often got so bad that all I could do was lie in bed." When she was evaluated for a heart transplant, in 2002, says Dr. Wagoner, "her arteries were like tiny twigs that nothing could fix. It was amazing that she was still alive. She was extremely impaired and didn't have any quality of life. It was hard to look someone so young in the face and say, Sorry for your bad luck, but we can't help you anymore. All we could do was treat her with medications, knowing it was very likely she'd have another heart attack."

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