By Sarah Blackmore
Bonita and Dex Pelley stand in Bridie Molloy’s, a lively pub in downtown St. John’s, wearing a wedding dress and a suit. These are the same outfits they wore 24 years ago, the first time they said, “I do.”
Now they’re doing it all again, but this time, with a change of heart. Read the article in CBC News.
By Anna Giorgi
A heart transplant is a major surgery that involves replacing your diseased heart with a healthy donor heart. It is used as a last resort when drugs and other therapies no longer work in treating advanced heart failure.
Heart failure is a chronic problem that prevents your heart from pumping blood through the rest of your body as it should. The problem can occur as left-sided heart failure, right-sided heart failure, or congestive heart failure.1 Read the article in Verywell Health.
By Enrique Rivero
FINDINGS
UCLA-led research finds that among adult congenital heart disease (CHD) transplant recipients, single-ventricle physiology correlated with higher short-term mortality. But 10-year conditional survival was similar for biventricular and most single-ventricle CHD patients, and notably better for biventricular CHD patients compared to non-CHD heart transplant recipients. Read more from UCLA Health.
By Peter Wehrwein, Managing Editor
The advent of the direct-acting antivirals, such as Harvoni (ledipasvir and sofosbuvir) means people can be treated for HCV infection if they receive a heart from an HCV-viremic donor, according to a recent review paper. The supply of hearts available for transplantation has increased, partly because HCV-viremic individuals are now part of the donor pool.
Transplanting organs, including hearts, from people infected with hepatitis C virus (HCV) used to be avoided because of the risk of infection and studies showing that the recipients had worse outcomes,
Marina Nunez, M.D., Ph.D., of Wake Forest School of Medicine, co-wrote a review paper exploring the hepatitis C infection and heart transplantation.
But when the direct-acting antivirals against hepatitis C started to come on the market, particularly Harvoni (ledipasvir and sofosbuvir) in 2014, the views and practices changed. Read more in Managed Healthcare Executive.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.