Topic: Stormie Jones

Stormie Dawn Jones (May 30, 1977 – November 11, 1990) was the world's first successful recipient of a simultaneous heart and liver organ transplant. On February 14, 1984, Drs. Thomas E. Starzl and Henry T. Bahnson replaced the six-year-old's heart and liver at the Pittsburgh Children's Hospital in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Stormie had a condition which raised her blood cholesterol to 10 times normal levels. The condition, a severe form of familial hypercholesterolemia, and the resultant high levels of low density lipoprotein gave her two heart attacks when she was six years old. The case showed that the liver controls blood cholesterol and that high cholesterol is controllable. that damaged her organs. Stormie Jones was a part of the research on cholesterol and the liver that won Joseph L. Goldstein and Michael S. Brown the Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine in 1985. Stormie died on on November 11, 1990. Her death was related to rejection of the heart transplant she had received in 1984.