A three year-old girl has become the first in the world with a complex heart condition to be fitted with an artificial heart and survive. Abigail Hall was born with a severe heart defect which meant that only one chamber of her heart was working.
The girl from Glasgow spent her first years of life in and out of hospital. She underwent corrective surgery at the Diana, Princess of Wales children's hospital in Birmingham. In spite of medical efforts, her heart began to fail last year and doctors decided her only chance was a heart transplant. But while waiting for a donated heart to become available, she would have died if surgeons had not decided to fit a Berlin heart - an artificial mechanism designed to support the functioning of a failing heart.
Berlin hearts have often been used in other children, but never before in a child who had only one chamber working.
Named after the company which makes them, the Berlin heart is designed to bridge the wait for a transplant. It works by helping the right ventricle of the heart to pump blood to the lungs and the left to pump blood to the body. It comes in a range of sizes, even one small enough for a newborn baby.
Most of the device is outside the body. The tubes are implanted into the chambers and emerge from the body to enter the pump. The system is run by a laptop computer.
Surgeons at the specialist Freeman hospital in Newcastle had to overcome technical difficulties to rig up the pump in a special way because one of Abigail's heart chambers was not functioning at all. The child had the operation last year and it was successful.
Just before Christmas, a heart became available, she was taken off the machine and had a transplant. She is now ready to go home to Glasgow, the hospital said yesterday.
A spokesman for the Newcastle upon Tyne Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust said: "With time running out this was Abigail's last chance and she was successfully placed on the Berlin heart to wait for transplant organ to be found.
"Thankfully Abigail received her transplant just before Christmas and is now ready to go home - the only child in the world to have a mechanical heart for this type of heart condition and survive."
This is not the first time that records have been broken in Britain using the Berlin heart.
Last August, 13 month-old Jack Vellam from Pitsford, Northamptonshire, was kept on the machine for an unprecedented four months.