Pitt surgeon was medical pioneer
Let’s say you’ve had a heart attack and survived.
Not too long ago, doctors wouldn’t have done much for you. They would have just advised you take it easy. They would not have deployed stents to open blocked arteries, prescribed medications that lower cholesterol and blood pressure, suggested a regime of cardiac rehabilitaion exercises or, in cases demanding more rigorous intervention, wheeled you into an operating room for bypass surgery.
The same goes for other debilitating or fatal conditions. Middle-aged or elderly people with failing hips or knees damaged by injuries, overuse or arthritis once just had to make do with canes, wheelchairs or simply sitting at home and letting the world churn on without them. It’s almost certain that isolation and inactivity of that variety served as a breeding ground for other, more severe health problems.
In just the last half-century, we’ve made immense progress in these areas and many others. Artificial hips and knees can put people back on bicycles or tennis courts. Heart patients can do the same. We haven’t yet discovered a fountain of youth, and, at least in the United States, we haven’t yet found a mechanism to lower costs and make health care coverage fully accessible to everyone. But we’ve made vast progress over the last 50 years or so, and there’s every reason to hope we will make even more progress in the next 50.
One of the pioneers in the medical advances of recent decades was Dr. Thomas Starzl, a world-renowned surgeon who became affiliated with the University of Pittsburgh in 1981. It was there that he continued to refine the innovative work he started in the 1960s in the realm of organ transplantation, which was once thought to inhabit the realm of science fiction, and was an object of deep skepticism in the medical community. Starzl carried out the first successful liver transplant in 1967. Although kidneys had been replaced since the 1950s, a liver transplant was thought to be virtually impossible to pull off, because of the complications of hooking up bile ducts and other structures to a new liver.
“Each one is a thread on which the whole enterprise hangs,” Starzl once said.
Liver transplants have become more common and, according to the American Liver Foundation, 6,000 are carried out in the United States every year. Thanks to anti-rejection drugs that Starzl helped advance and other breakthroughs, liver transplant patients now have an 86 percent first-year survival rate and a 78 percent three-year survival rate. On the downside, however, there are an estimated 17,000 children and adults on waiting lists for donated livers, and about 1,500 die every year while waiting for one.
Starzl died on Saturday at age 90, an apparently unexpected death. According to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, he continued to put in days at the office and had few evident health issues of major concern. He has been lauded for his contributions to American medicine and, also, for what he brought to the University of Pittsburgh and its surrounding region. Mark A. Nordenberg, chancellor emeritus at Pitt, described Starzl as “a hero to countless transplant patients, their families and their physicians, while also playing a key role in the elevation of Pitt and the transformation of Pittsburgh.”
Indeed, while Pittsburgh is still sometimes envisioned in the wider world as a soot-encrusted, smog-engulfed industrial wasteland, it’s medicine and education that have been sparking the city’s revival. It’s figures like Starzl who will continue to put Pittsburgh and the wider region on the map.