By Radina Gigova and Svitlana Vlasova, CNN
Amid the raging war and constant threat of Russian missiles, a successful heart transplant has been performed on a 6-year-old girl in Kyiv, authorities with the Heart Institute of Ukraine’s Ministry of Health announced on Monday.
The three-hour operation, which took place on Sunday evening, gave the girl the heart of a 4-year-old boy, whom doctors had declared brain dead after suffering an aneurysm. Read the full story on CNN.
A new data monitoring report contains key measures of the adult heart allocation system. The data indicates that adult heart transplants continue to increase following implementation of the updated allocation system, which was implemented October 18, 2018. Read the full article from UNOS.
By Regina Shaffer
Editor’s Note: This is part 1 of a three-part Healio Exclusive series on developments and challenges in heart transplantation.
Heart transplantation is considered standard therapy for patients with end-stage HF, and survival and the availability of donor hearts have continued to improve over time.
In 2022, there were 4,111 heart transplants in the United States, an increase of 21.5% from 2021, according to the United Network for Organ Sharing (UNOS). Read the full article in Healio.
By Erik Swain
Researchers identified thresholds for low oxygen delivery leading to acute kidney injury during cardiac surgery that were lower than previously reported.
“Our team has a longstanding interest in evaluating determinants of postoperative acute kidney injury using clinically informed datasets,” Donald S. Likosky, PhD, head of the Section of Health Services Research and Quality at the University of Michigan Health Department of Cardiac Surgery, told Healio. Read the full article in Healio.
By Deborah Kotz
A new study published in The Lancet on June 29 has revealed the most extensive analysis to date on what led to the eventual heart failure in the world’s first successful transplant of a genetically modified pig heart into a human patient. This groundbreaking procedure was conducted by University of Maryland School of Medicine (UMSOM) physician-scientists in January 2022 and marked an important milestone for medical science. Read the full article in UMB News.
By Ellen Kenny
One young woman got a second chance at life following a heart transplant – and then a chance to be immortalised when she gave her old heart to a museum.
In 2006, Jennifer Sutton was diagnosed with restrictive cardiomyopathy, a disease that stiffens some of the heart’s chambers, preventing blood from pumping around the body. Read the full article in Newstalk.
HOUSTON (JUNE 28, 2023) – The Texas Children’s Hospital Heart Failure Team has been named the 2023 Outstanding Heart Failure Care Team award winner by the Heart Failure Society of America. The team will be formally recognized at an award ceremony in Cleveland, OH later this year.
The Heart Failure Team is part of Texas Children’s Heart Center, recently ranked #1 in the nation by U.S. News and World Report for pediatric cardiology and heart surgery for the seventh consecutive year. The team is uniquely suited to care for the most complex cardiac patients from infancy to adulthood with its world-class expertise in fetal and neonatal cardiology, congenital heart surgery, cardiac intensive care, and adult congenital heart disease. Read the full article from Texas Children’s Hospital.
As a heart transplant recipient, you’ll quickly find yourself being asked to take a laundry list of blood tests. While this can be inconvenient and frustrating, it’s also really important. Your doctor can’t tell what’s going on with your new heart by looking at you. Blood tests provide information on how well your heart is functioning and how your medications may be affecting your body. By reviewing the results, your physician may adjust medications, recommend changes to your diet or fluid intake, or recognize the need for additional examination.
Read the full article on CareDx.com.
By Luke Halpern
Notably, donor hearts from those who underwent circulatory death were able to be preserved and analyzed in situ.
Survival at 6 months after transplantation with a donor heart that was reanimated and assessed after circulatory-death was found to be noninferior to patient survival among recipients of the standard care transplantation using a donor heart that had been preserved in cold storage after brain-death, according to the results of a new study published in The New England Journal of Medicine. The more in Pharmacy Times.
Ryan Scoble, a long stick middie for the Mercyhurst University lacrosse team, thought he had to cut his career short after undergoing a heart transplant but he was determined to return to the game he loves with a miracle recovery. Watch the full story from NBC’s Harry Smith here.