Doctors at Vietnam-Germany Friendship Hospital have set a record after successfully performing a heart transplant on a 7-year-old child of Hanoi, the youngest patient of its kind in Vietnam.

Doctors perform an organ transplant at Vietnam-Germany
Friendship Hospital. (Illustrative image)

Assoc. Prof. & Dr. Nguyen Huu Uoc, Director of the hospital’s Heart and Chest Center, said that the child, L.X.H, needed a heart transplant after suffering from dilated cardiomyopathy and end-stage heart failure 7 months ago.

Luckily, H. received a heart from a 19-year-old man who had brain death due to a traffic accident. Tests showed major indices of the donor and the recipient are completely consistent, though the donor’s body is 3.5 times greater than that of the child.

The surgery was carried out on February 1 and the child now remains conscious at the Resuscitation Department of the Heart and Chest Center. The patient is able to sit up, eat, drink and play in bed.

This is the fifth heart transplant the hospital has performed on children, and H is the youngest patient that has had such surgery in Vietnam.

So far, Vietnam-Germany Friendship Hospital has carried out five lung, 36 heart, 92 liver and nearly 1,100 kidney transplants. It is the country’s leading center for collecting and transplanting multiple organs from human brain donors. All the patients remain healthy after surgery.