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A comment on Australian man survives 100 days with artificial heart. Parent comment

Re:Australian man survives 100 days with artificial heart by armenarmen on Wednesday March 12, 2025 @02:07AM (#43340366)
sorry, so the heart is still beating in the dead donor? The doctors harvesting the heart stops the donors heart from beating? I have to be missing something here. You cannot be saying that doctors stop the donors heart from beating (kill them) before taking the heart.
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Re:Australian man survives 100 days with artificial heart by qingcharles on Wednesday March 12, 2025 @02:34AM (#43340472)
As poster above you states, they are clinically dead at the point the heart is removed. Their brain has stopped functioning. There is no coming back. They are a meat popsicle.
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Re:Australian man survives 100 days with artificial heart by MadnessASAP on Wednesday March 12, 2025 @03:02AM (#43340575)
A stopped heart doesn't necessarily mean a person's dead, a beating heart doesn't mean their alive.
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Re:Australian man survives 100 days with artificial heart by ArnoVW on Wednesday March 12, 2025 @03:33AM (#43340711)
If you’re a heart donor, you have been diagnosed as “brain dead”. This means that even though your heart is still beating and you’re drawing breath, your ECG is a flatline, and there is no hope of recovery (with our current medical technology)

That means that your grieving next of kin have decided (for you, since you no longer have conscious thoughts) that your last act on this planet will be an act of kindness. You will give your heart, lungs, eyes, etc to someone that can still make use of them. The last thing you will do, is saving the life of someone.

So yes, they (directly or indirectly) stop the heart.

And that is a good thing.

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Re:Australian man survives 100 days with artificial heart by teraflop on Wednesday March 12, 2025 @08:08AM (#43342359)
When they remove the donor heart, the donor's body will die no matter what. How did you think a heart transplant worked? That's why, as others have said, it's only done when the donor is already legally and medically dead, even though their heart is beating.

It is technically possible to artificially keep the heart beating during the transplant process, but that's a very recent technical development and a much more difficult surgical procedure. So stopping the heart first is normal.

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