Mother to Child: First Living Donor Lung Transplant

Abstract

IN THE LATEST example of the lengths to which a mother will go in hopes of saving the life of a terminally ill child, 45-year-old Versell Johnson of Salt Lake City, Utah, donated one third of her right lung to replace the entire right lung of her 12-year-old daughter, Mazie Bond. The child suffered from bronchopulmonary dysplasia but "both mother and daughter are expected to resume normal activity within a few months," says Vaughn A. Starnes, MD, head of the heart-lung transplant program, Stanford (Calif) University Medical Center, who did the operation. Starnes is evaluating several more cases for possible living-donor transplantation. He estimates that several hundred children in the United States might benefit each year from a single lung transplant—from a live donor or a cadaver—to help them deal with the effects of bronchopulmonary dysplasia, pulmonary hypertension, and congenital diaphragmatic hernias. Starnes says the fact that children who receive