Oct. 20, 2022 – A new study shows that life-saving heart procedures were performed on white adults twice as often as on Black adults, causing researchers to suspect racial bias among clinical decision-makers.
“The lives disabled or lost are simply too many,” Wendy C. Taddei-Peters, PhD, a study author, said in a news release from the National Institutes of Health. Read more in Web MD.
The Nebraska Medicine heart transplant team is celebrating their 500th heart transplant. And wow, are their hearts full.
“Performing 500 transplants gives a second chance at life for so many people,” says Brian Lowes, MD, PhD. Dr. Lowes specializes in advanced heart failure and transplant cardiology. He credits the exciting milestone to the team’s advanced expertise. “We’re using the next generation of technology here. And our surgeons are going farther and farther to get more organs ready for transplant.” Read the full article from Nebraska Medicine.
OK, so Sam Prince doesn’t play in the NFL, but he’s come closer to it than many of America’s greatest prospects ever will.
Born with a severe heart defect, Prince’s chances of living for five hours, let alone five years, were grim, but through a combination of great medical care, good luck, and the abiding love of his family, he survived, and at eight years old had a successful heart transplant. Read the full story in Rowan Today.
By Cara Murez HealthDay Reporter
WEDNESDAY, Oct. 19, 2022 (HealthDay News) — A person with advanced heart failure may often need a heart transplant or a mechanical heart pump to survive.
But white patients are twice as likely as Black patients to get this critically important care, a new study finds, and racial bias may be the reason why. Read the full story in U.S. News & World Report.
NASHVILLE, Tenn. — Roughly one in 10 adults with cystic fibrosis also had a diagnosis of heart failure, according to a real-world study of patient medical records reported here.
Among the roughly 15,000 cystic fibrosis patients, acute myocardial infarction (MI) and atrial fibrillation (Afib) were the other most commonly identified cardiac disorders, each present in about one in 20 patients in the analysis presented by Andres Cordova Sanchez, MD, of SUNY Upstate Medical University in Syracuse, New York. Read more in MedPage Today.
Sethan Wilder’s cardiovascular issues began early in life and continued for many years until a heart transplant was his only option.
When Sethan Wilder heard the heart he had been waiting for was available, the range of emotions he’d been feeling in the months prior seemed to all come back at once.
“Not just the news that I was in need of a heart transplant, but that I was lucky enough to have the opportunity to have a heart transplant,” the 28-year-old said. “I can’t say the news made me happy or sad necessarily, if anything it made me eager to take on this new challenge and all that comes with it. Read the full story in Michigan Health.
More than half of hospitalized adults with HF have obstructive sleep apnea or central sleep apnea, with male sex, higher BMI, higher heart rate and more comorbidities predicting sleep-disordered breathing, researchers reported.
“Considering the frequent co‐occurrence of sleep-disordered breathing in HF and its adverse prognosis, early diagnosis and treatment of sleep-disordered breathing may be beneficial,” Jian Zhang, MD, PhD, FACC, FESC, director of the Heart Failure Center at Fuwai Hospital in Beijing, and colleagues wrote in Clinical Cardiology. Read more in Healio.
In 2016, the Organ Procurement and Transplantation Network (OPTN), which is administered by the United Network for Organ Sharing (UNOS), approved a new heart allocation policy that went into effect October 18, 2018. The revised policy reflected the need to reassess prioritization of heart transplantation candidates and eliminate geographic disparities in access. It was designed to equitably allocate donor hearts to patients with the highest risk for mortality across geographic regions and increase the transplantation rate. Read this editorial collaboration from MedScape and American College of Cardiology.
Myocarditis and pericarditis after COVID-19 vaccination is rare across demographic groups and most likely to occur in teen boys in the week after their second shot of a two-dose vaccine, according to a study.
It was also more likely to occur after a booster shot compared with a first dose of vaccine, the study showed. Read the full story in Healio.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, the waiting list times for pediatric heart transplants were longer than before the pandemic, but waiting list mortality did not change, according to a research letter published in JAMA Network Open.
The researchers compared 610 children (mean age, 6.93 years) who received a heart transplant during the pandemic period, defined as March 2020 to June 2021, with 626 children (mean age, 6.74 years) who received a heart transplant during the pre-pandemic period, defined as November 2018 to February 2020. Read the full story in Healio.