Anas, the first boy to receive both a heart and a liver transplant in Spain: "Now I want to study physics and mathematics."

BarcelonaAnas was born with a heart defect: instead of two ventricles, he only had one. When he was just a few months old, he had to undergo surgery. Doctors performed up to three surgeries to ensure his quality of life and the proper blood supply to his entire body. In the final operation, they disconnected some veins from his heart and connected them to the pulmonary artery, ensuring blood flow to his lungs. This technique is known as Fontan surgery, named after the doctor who invented it. Thanks to this procedure, he was able to lead a normal life: he went to school, played with his friends, and played sports. However, at age 13, his blood flow began to slow down, he stopped going to school because he couldn't leave the house, and some organs, such as his liver and intestines, began to suffer.

Fontan surgery is an effective solution, but it's not definitive, as it can lead to heart failure, pulmonary hypertension, and liver problems. This is what happened to Anas, although it's not a common case in pediatric patients. When this happens, the only alternative for these patients is a transplant. After two years of private tutoring, customized diets, and numerous visits to the hospital, both for emergencies and routine appointments, the professionals at Vall d'Hebron Hospital performed a simultaneous heart and liver transplant. It's the first operation of its kind in Spain and it has been a success. Now Ana only thinks about getting her life back on track. "Next year, luckily, I'll start high school and study continuously. I want to study physics and mathematics, and I'd like to research electronics and computer science," she says with a smile.

For this teenager to be able to leave the hospital, an unprecedented operation in Spain was required, involving more than 30 professionals at Vall d'Hebron. "It's a milestone for the pediatric transplant program," celebrated the center's deputy director of care, José Manuel Domínguez, this Friday. Until now, this type of transplant had only been performed in Spanish hospitals on an adult patient at the Gregorio Marañón Hospital. There are very few precedents for this in minors worldwide, most of them in the United States. "Now, luckily, I won't have to go to the hospital every week, no matter how much I love the doctors," Anas said, smiling, during Friday's press conference.

Organs outside the body

Until recently, Ana had to go to the hospital every two weeks to receive a transfusion of albumin, a blood protein. Due to slow blood circulation, she began to develop fibrosis in her liver, which is the deterioration of healthy tissue in the organ, a condition that can lead to cirrhosis. Therefore, a transplant was necessary, not only for her heart, but also for her liver. One of the keys to performing this procedure was the use of a new technology called HOPE, which stands for Hypothermic Oxygenated Perfusion.

This technique allows for altering the length of time an organ can be outside the body without oxygen or nutrients. Normally, under these conditions, the heart can survive for about four hours, and the liver for a maximum of eight hours. This short duration requires a highly organized circuit to perform the transplant. With Hope technology, an oxygenated fluid at a very low temperature is circulated through the donor's liver to better preserve it and prevent damage while it is outside the body. This allows the cardiac surgery team to perform the heart transplant without having to race against time.

Ana is now 16 and insists she's only thinking about starting school after nearly three years of private tutoring at home. The Vall d'Hebron team celebrates the exceptional recovery time following this surgery, even having to slow him down at times when he wants to run too hard to burn stages after all this time struggling to move and being so tied to the hospital. His mother, Malika, thanked the entire medical team for giving her son a "new life," and also for her, who will no longer live "with worry or alarm bells ringing every now and then about rushing to the emergency room."