In 1967 at the Groote Schuur Hospital in Cape Town, South Africa. Christiaan Barnard's team transplanted the heart of a young woman, who had been run over, into 56-year-old Louis Washkansky, who had already suffered three heart attacks.
However, although the intervention passed to posterity as a great milestone, the results were not as expected. Washkansky died within eighteen days of pneumonia , and the vast majority of subsequent attempts failed, mostly due to rejection problems of the implanted organs. In fact, there was a stoppage and during the 70s something like this was hardly tried again.
Doctor Román does not doubt: "The great leap was, again, cyclosporine." Its introduction allowed heart transplants to resume in the early 1980s.
Today, approximately 85% of operated patients survive the first year.
