A five-day-old girl who weighed six pounds at birth has become the youngest person to receive a liver transplant.
The baby, Baebhen Schuttke of Dublin, was already five months old and reportedly fully healthy when the operation was announced earlier this month. Because her immune system was too immature to recognize the donor liver as foreign, Baebhen was expected to grow up without needing immunosuppressive drugs. The procedure was performed at King's College Hospital in London, Europe's largest transplant center.
Baebhen was born with neonatal hemochromatosis, a rare condition that causes a build-up of iron in the lungs and that killed Baebhen's two infant brothers. Baebhen would have been expected to live no longer than a few weeks had a donor liver not become available. However, transplantation became possible following the death of a 10-year-old London-area boy whose liver was reduced to an eighth of its original size before the transplant. Surgeons then transplanted the liver into Baebhen in a six-hour operation that required the dissection and tying of hundreds of miniscule blood vessels with the help of magnification and microsurgery.
Mohammed Rela, lead surgeon of the 20-member team that performed the transplant, reported that the baby "has done very well, and the liver is now adapting to her body and is growing normally. She will not need another transplant when she's older."
Baebhen's parents, Ita and Jurgen Schuttke, described being overwhelmed by the procedure's "brilliant and miraculous" outcome. The couple has a five-year-old daughter who does not have the condition.
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