Zagreb Rebro Hospital Performs 14 Transplants in 14 Days

September the 12th, 2024 – Another remarkable feat carried out by Croatian doctors as fourteen transplants in fourteen days are carried out at the Zagreb Rebro Hospital (KBC Zagreb).

As Poslovni Dnevnik writes, doctors from the Zagreb Rebro Hospital successfully performed an impressive fourteen transplants in just fourteen days, three of which were multi-organ transplants. In one patient they performed a parallel heart and liver transplant, in another the same was done with the liver and kidney, and in the third patient, the same was done with the heart and kidney. The latter was the first time a transplant of that nature had ever been performed in Croatia.

“The heart and kidney transplant was done for the first time in the Republic of Croatia, which makes us happy and we’re proud of our transplant teams. A programme as extensive as this being done in a mere two weeks required an extremely high level of organisation, sacrifice, and enthusiasm from everyone participating in this solid organ transplant programme,” said Zagreb Rebro Hospital director Ante Ćorušić.

He emphasised that some of the involved employees interrupted their annual summer breaks to return and participate in these intensive transplants.

Ćorušić added that it’s very rare that any hospital can boast of having performed three multi-organ transplants in such a short time, especially since mono-organ transplants were also performed at the same time, which required the additional cooperation of the transplant teams.

“The transplant teams at the Zagreb Rebro Hospital have made a significant success both at the national level and more widely within the framework of Eurotransplant. All of the patients who were transplanted were on the Eurotransplant list,” he pointed out.

All of the patients who underwent these transplants are currently doing very well, are stable and recovering at the pace and in the manner they should be.

Davor Miličić, head of the Clinic for Heart and Blood Vessel Diseases and head of the heart transplant team, said that they had prepared for the first heart and kidney transplant in Croatia on several occasions. Now “finally” all the favourable circumstances coincided – they had a suitable patient, all the correct test results, and the matching donor.

As yet another success for the Zagreb Rebro Hospital, he mentioned the simultaneous heart and liver transplant. This particular procedure wasn’t the first for this hospital, but it is an extremely complex undertaking that ended in success this time as well. This involved a patient who suffered from a hereditary disease that tragically destroys the structure and function of the heart through the production of pathological amyloid in the liver.

Through a heart and liver transplant, his disease was halted.

The head of the Clinic for Cardiac Surgery, Hrvoje Gašparović, emphasised the success of the Croatian transplant programme at the global level.

An extremely impressive 48 heart transplants were performed in Croatia last year, which is 12 transplants per million inhabitants, with 3.5 being performed in Germany. By 2022, only 20 heart and liver transplants have been performed in all of Europe, and the Zagreb Rebro Hospital now has two of those firmly under its belt.

He explained that the heart is the organ that has the narrowest time frame within which a transplant needs to be done – about four to four and a half hours.

This includes the time from the moment the donor heart is taken to the moment it is restarted, and very often more than two hours are lost on the transport itself. Owing to that very short time frame, the Zagreb Rebro Hospital uses all possible means of transport at their disposal, even including planes and helicopters, concluded Gašparović.