Heart Transplant Mother’s Death Attributed to Rejection
The death of Betsy Sneith, the 24-year-old Santee woman who last summer became the first heart transplant recipient to give birth, was apparently caused by “acute rejection” of the heart she had received five years earlier, her cardiologist said Thursday.
Dr. Howard Dittrich, the cardiologist who had monitored Sneith’s condition through her pregnancy, said that preliminary results of an autopsy suggest that her death was related to heart failure.
Sneith, whose daughter, Sierra, is now a ward of San Diego County, was suffering chest pains when she was taken by helicopter to UC San Diego Medical Center on Wednesday. She died two hours later.
The exact cause of death will be determined later by microscopic evaluation, Dittrich said. “We definitely know she did not have a heart attack. It was heart failure, not a heart attack,” said hospital spokeswoman Shari Smith.
The baby was taken to the county’s Hillcrest Receiving Home.
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