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UPMC Bridging the Great Health Divide: Pediatric Heart Transplant

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By WDTV News Staff

BRIDGEPORT, W.Va (WDTV) – Pediatric heart transplant is a highly specialized form of health care performed at UPMC Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh. Jasmin Adous tells us more in this month’s Bridging the Great Health Divide sponsored by UPMC Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh.

The pediatric heart transplant program at UPMC Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh was the second of it’s kind in the world. Surgeons have performed almost 400 pediatric and young adult heart transplants since 1982. Dr. Brian Feingold is the program’s Director of Heart Failure and Heart Transplantation. He says the program’s success it due to it’s people.
Read the full story from WDTV here.

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Reanimated hearts donated after death work just as well for transplants, study finds

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By Elaine Chen

A new method of heart transplantation that uses machines to reanimate donor hearts from people who have died is just as good as traditional heart transplantation, a new study finds. If adopted broadly in the U.S., the procedure that could expand the donor pool by 30%.

The adjusted six-month survival rate of patients undergoing the new method was 94%, compared with 91% among patients who underwent the traditional method, according to the study published in the New England Journal of Medicine Wednesday, the first large randomized study comparing the two procedures. Read the full article in STAT.

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ESKD, Death Risks Are High After Heart Transplantation With Kidney Dysfunction

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By Natasha Persaud

Heart-alone transplant recipients with pre-existing kidney impairment have “unacceptably high” risks of progressing to end-stage kidney disease (ESKD) requiring renal replacement therapy and dying, investigators warned at the 2023 American Transplant Congress in San Diego, California.

Using the 2000-2018 Scientific Registry of Transplant Recipients, Rose Mary Attieh, MD, of the Mayo Clinic in Jacksonville, Florida, and colleagues identified 3391 first-time recipients of a heart-only transplant who had a low baseline estimated glomerular filtration rate (eGFR; in mL/min/1.73m2).
Read the full story in Renal & Urology News.

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In a time of grief, a stranger’s family gave him the ultimate gift

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By Brigid McCarthy, Laura Kwerel

This story is part of the My Unsung Hero series, from the Hidden Brain team, about people whose kindness left a lasting impression on someone else.

A few years ago, Andy Davis and his wife decided to ride their bikes across the country. They spent months training and planning for their adventure.

But one day in February of 2020, just a few months before they were going to start, Davis felt an intense pain across his chest. After two Medevac flights and some time in the hospital, he was diagnosed with heart failure, a serious condition in which the heart can no longer pump blood efficiently. Read the full story from NPR.

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New Heart Transplant Method Could Boost Donor Pool By 30%: Study

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By Ralph Ellis

A recently developed way to perform heart transplants works as well as the traditional method and,  if widely embraced,  could greatly increase the number of hearts available for transplant, doctors at Duke University say.

The study team looked at 180 heart transplants conducted at numerous hospitals, half involving hearts from brain-dead donors – the traditional method – and half involving hearts from people who had circulatory deaths. Circulatory death occurs when all circulatory and respiratory functions stop.
Read more in WebMD.

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She’s survived cancer, heart failure and a heart transplant

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By Laura Williamson, American Heart Association News

When Dawn Mussallem was little, she dreamed of having her face on a Smucker’s jar – the recognition the “Today” show gives to people who reach their 100th birthday.

So, she committed herself to eating a healthy plant-based diet, eschewing junk food and many childhood staples, like chocolate milk and sugary cereals. She also stayed physically active – becoming a competitive gymnast and running on the weekends.
Read the full story in American Heart Association News.

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Trial Affirms Safety of Circulatory-Death Heart Transplants

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— 6-month results reported for perfusion-tested hearts outside of normal brain-death donation route

By Crystal Phend

Transplants from circulatory-death donor hearts assessed with a perfusion machine did just as well as those procured after brain death and cold storage, a randomized trial showed.

Recipients of a circulatory-death heart had noninferior risk-adjusted 6-month survival compared with brain-death heart recipients (94% vs 90%) in the as-treated population, with a 3-percentage point advantage by the least-squares mean difference calculation in the primary endpoint (P<0.001 for noninferiority). Read the full article in MedPage Today.

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‘Troubling numbers’ reveal pandemic’s toll on CVD deaths, widening race disparities

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By Regina Schaffer and Scott Buzby

In 2020, heart disease remained among the leading causes of death, even amid the COVID-19 pandemic, which may have exacerbated preexisting CVD morbidity-related racial and ethnic disparities.

As the initial wave of the COVID-19 pandemic began, more than 3.3 million overall deaths were registered in the U.S., which exceeded the 2019 figure by more than 500,000 deaths, according to the American Heart Association’s annual Heart Disease and Stroke Statistics update. Read the full story in Healio.

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U-M HEALTH PERFORMS ITS FIRST HEART TRANSPLANT AFTER CARDIAC DEATH

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As the number of heart transplants performed across the U.S. continues to grow, surgeons at the Frankel Cardiovascular Center are taking advantage of technology that could increase its transplant yield by as much as 30%.

In March, transplant surgeons completed the health system’s first heart transplant using an organ from a donor who had recently died — a process called donation after circulatory death, or DCD. The patient, a man in his 30s, received the heart after years of deteriorating due to congenital heart failure.
Read the full story from Michigan Medicine.

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