Elderly woman lived with organs in opposite places of her body

Rose Marie Bentley lived a full life up to the age of 99 with a rare condition.

Other than her heart, all her other organs were in different places than where they should have been.

It’s so rare in fact, that it mostly occurs once in every 22,000 births. However, those previously documented with the condition, did not surpass the age of seventy-three.

“People with the condition known as situs inversus with levocardia often have life-threatening cardiac ailments and other abnormalities, according to Oregon Health & Science University.”

Bentley had three organ removal surgeries within her life. Yet only one surgeon had documented that her appendix was in a different place.

Louise Allee is the daughter of Rose. She expressed her surprise that Bentley’s doctors hadn’t mentioned the off details.

Consequently, a learning experience is being gained from Rose’s body being donated to Oregon Health and Science University.

Cameron Walker is an OHSU assistant professor of anatomy. In short, he commented: “This is an important case that really gave us an opportunity to talk about the importance of future clinicians paying attention to subtle anatomic variations, not just large anatomic variations, in terms of addressing their future patients as individuals.”

Transplants for Infected Organs

To solve the shortage of organs for the long list of patients that are waiting to be saved. There’s a new option for them to speed up the wait time.

Doctors have started using infected organs with Hepatitis C, that would normally go to waste. It’s a possiblity for researchers to prevent patients that are receiving the hearts and lungs from obtaining the virus to begin with.

People that received a transplant last year equaled to 36, 529, while over 113,000 people had been on the waiting list. However, after a newly released drug came to light in 2016, surgeons started doing infected transplants on patients. If the virus showed, then they would use the treatment of medicine for three months to clear it. Prior to this new method, they would only use infected organs on patients  already infected with Hepatits C.

Johns Hopkins University and the University of Pennsylvania had trials done. The outcomes of the transplanted kidneys resulted in functional and the virus became extinct. Similarly, hearts and lungs was tested next. At Penn, 9 out of 10 patients survived with treatment.

A new method was done with Brigham researchers. As mentioned in the Associated Press, “Within hours of either a heart or lung transplant, participants started taking medicine for a month in hopes of blocking hepatitis C infection rather than having to treat it.”

Patients six months post surgery had uninfected working hearts and lungs. After that, only one had died of causes unrelated to the virus.

Dr. David Klassen who is the chief medical officer for the United Network for Organ Sharing commented. “It’s not established that cure rates are 100 percent. To believe they would be, would be a little naive.”