Heart Transplant

Left ventricular assist devices, which are mechanical heart pumps, are an important treatment for patients with advanced heart failure.

Recent changes to a heart transplant allocation policy improved waitlist outcomes for children born with heart defects and adults with cardiomyopathy, but not in children with cardiomyopathy or adults with heart defects, data show.

A simple median waiting time that did not account for censoring, death and other competing events underestimated time to organ transplantation by up to 61% compared with a competing-risk model, according to a study conducted in Switzerland.

Stanford Medicine Children’s Health this year celebrated 50 years of pediatric heart transplants and more than 35 years of pediatric lung transplants, according to a press release.

The first implantation of a new class of total artificial heart, a rotary pump with a single moving part, was successfully completed by a team at The Texas Heart Institute, the institution reported.

The 2016 revisions to the United Network for Organ Sharing pediatric heart transplant allocation policy were not independently associated with a drop in waitlist mortality, researchers reported.

HF is associated with a fourfold increased risk for death and a sixfold to ninefold increased risk for sudden cardiac death, and its direct and indirect costs are estimated to reach $69.8 billion annually in the United States by 2030.

Since the implant of the first left ventricular assist device in 1994, the HF community observed significant technological innovation in durable mechanical circulatory support.

A cardiac transport system for donor hearts was associated with fewer complications than conventional ice storage in patients receiving extended-criteria donor hearts, researchers reported in the Journal of Heart and Lung Transplantation.

Despite narrowing sex and racial procedural disparities in HF treatment, gaps persist, with lower rates of left ventricular assist device use and heart transplant among women and Black men vs. their white and male counterparts, data show.