40 Years of Heart Transplants

Heart transplants are generally performed on patients with untreatable, terminal heart disease, Stinson said, including those with clogged arteries or damaged heart muscle. While heart disease is very common, heart transplants are not. According to the American Heart Association, about 2,100 heart transplants are performed each year in the United States.

The lack of available donor hearts is the main challenge, Stinson said. The hearts must come from people who are still alive but brain dead.

In the early years, there was controversy over the concept of brain death, in which a person is declared essentially dead even though he or she is still technically alive, Stinson recalled. And some heart-transplant patients worried about getting hearts from people of the other gender or other races.

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But those worries dissipated, he said.

Craze said her heart came from a young Utah girl who was in a car accident. Craze's own heart was losing elasticity, filling up with blood but unable to pump it out, she said.

"It was experimental to do it on someone of my size," she said. "The big question was that they didn't know if the heart would grow with the body."

It did. "I don't know," she said, "about being any other way."

More information

Learn more about heart transplants from the American Heart Association.