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It does make me wonder how the transplanted pig heart or any transplanted heart connects so seamlessly.

The issue simply heals and grows together with the foreign tissue?



They use a common medical technique called anastomosis. Basically they just sew the two arteries/vessels together with suture and the blood and tissue seals it as any other cut or nick in the body. Sometimes they use "bioglue" but its not strictly needed, just a timesaver.


And the pig tissue then connects with the human tissue and eventually heals to form a connected vessel? or it never grows together but it is sealed with a blood cloth?


Exactly, the former.


So say I carve a wound onto my skin, and then put live skin with a sufficient tissue match onto it and connect the blood vessels so that the new live skin does not die; then the live skin graft and my own damaged skin will hen heal into each other and form a connected totality?


For skin & a "sufficient tissue match", yes. See e.g. tissue scaffolds.


It's not quite all that seamless - since we can't hook up the nerves, your new heart won't adjust its rate the way your original did.


I didn't know that. Do all heart transplants come with pacemakers then?

Edit: looks like it's just some nerves, not all.

> Your transplanted heart will respond to activity a little differently. Your heart rate will not increase like it used to. And you will have a higher resting heart rate. This is because some of the nerves that control your heart were cut during your surgery.

https://www.cham.org/HealthwiseArticle.aspx?id=hw30661


My understanding -- which should be taken with two grains of salt, I'm a programmer not a doctor -- is that the pacemaker cells which actually go "beat now beat now beat now" are part of the heart itself, and transplanted with it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cardiac_pacemaker

The nerves from the rest of the body are needed to tell these cells "we need more oxygen, beat faster" or "sleepy time, beat slower".


Could a surgeon cut the nerves and pacemaker cells away from the diseased heart and implant them into the donor heart?


I assume if they could reconnect the nerves to the new heart they would. There's no need to replace the pacemaker cells in the new heart with the old ones though.




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