Rare Heart Transplant for Man With Reversed Organs

Sept. 22, 2009— -- Jack Eigel, an active, vivacious 53-year-old, couldn't be more kind-hearted. But for much of his life people would kid him about having his heart in the wrong place ... and it wasn't a figure of speech.

Eigel, who lives near Milwaukee and has worked at a tabletop and home decor store for the last 20 years, has a condition called Situs Inversus. It causes all of his organs, including his heart, to be reversed.

"You know, when I was little, I tried to pledge allegiance the wrong way and got a few teachers mad at me," he joked.

On the inside, Eigel is a mirror image of someone with normal anatomy -- every organ in his chest and abdomen is flipped. His intestines, liver, lungs and heart are all on the opposite side of where they should be.

"I've had Situs Inversus all of my life, so it's something I don't even really think about," he said.

Situs Inversus is very rare.

"The exact incidence is not really known, but it probably affects somewhere around one in 10,000 people," said Dr. Alfred Nicolosi, a cardiothoracic surgeon at Milwaukee's Froedtert & Medical College of Wisconsin. "The majority of patients …really don't have any real problem from it. It's just everything inside is backwards."

It is a condition Eigel could have lived with his entire life with no problems, but three years ago, his heart started to fail. He had experienced shortness of breath and fatigue but attributed it to getting older, until he suffered a heart attack two days after Christmas 2006.

"Jack has something drastically wrong with his heart muscle and it doesn't contract normally," Nicolosi said. "It's to the point where we would call it stage D heart failure, or end stage heart failure."

Eigel's only hope of survival was a heart transplant, but given his unique anatomy, surgeons at Froedtert weren't sure it could be done.

"My first reaction was, is this anatomy going to be prohibitive to doing a heart transplant and has it been done before?" Nicolosi recalled.

There are only a handful of other heart transplants like this mentioned in medical literature. With 2,500 heart transplants performed annually in the U.S., Nicolosi said, "you can assume that, at most, that there are maybe one of these cases done every four or five years."

Froedtert & Medical College: http://www.froedtert.com/home.aspx

University of Wisconsin Hospital: http://www.uwhealth.org/