Rainer Gruessner - Medical Contributions

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Rainer Gruessner

• Giving Children Another Chance at Life

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• For Rainer Gruessner, giving children another
  chance at life is a primary motivation for his
  development of groundbreaking contributions to
  the medical field. One of these contributions
  includes successful bowel transplantation in
  pediatric patients.

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• In 1998, Dr. Gruessner transplanted six feet of
  small bowel from a father to his son. The 16-year
  old boy had lost all of his small bowel as a
  result of a car accident two years prior. At the
  time of the accident, the teenage patient was
  unable to digest food properly, forcing him to
  receive intravenous feeding or total parenteral
  nutrition (TPN).

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• Instead of receiving the bowel from a living
  donor, Dr. Gruessner instead used three organs of
  a deceased infant, allowing the young patient to
  receive a liver and pancreas in addition to the
  small bowel. This three organ transplant was the
  first of its kind in Arizona and the Southwestern
  United States.

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• The patient is no longer on TPN and is capable of
  digesting food. Her quality of life is markedly
  improved and she is growing up like a normal
  child. The procedure was just as important to the
  University Medical Center in Tucson patients who
  previously required such transplants were forced
  to travel to Nebraska or to Miami to receive
  treatment.

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