Tag: heart transplantation

A 56 year-old woman with a transplanted heart, with arterial hypertension and chronic pulmonary obstructive disease, washospitalised because of palpitations, dyspnea, chest pain and oedema...

Some patients awaiting heart transplantation may develop positive panel reactive antibodies (PRA). Several reports have demonstrated that pre-transplant sensitisation is associated with decreased survival and a higher rejection rate, and leads to the development of cardiac allograft vasculopathy...

One way of defining an individual’s heart effort is to calculate the maximum heart rate to be expected given their age, but the reinnervation seen in patients who have received heart transplants makes for different calculations from patients who have suffered heart failure....

Background: For over 40 years now orthotopic heart transplantation (OHT) has been the treatment of choice in patients with advanced heart failure. For many years patients undergoing OHT have been treated with the classical approach involving anastomosis of the donor atria with the recipient atria resulting in a heart in which the atria are enlarged. An alternative method for OHT is the bicaval anastomosis technique, which involves connecting both of the donor’s venae cavae with the recipient’s venae cavae...

The main cause of early death after heart transplantation (HTx) is so-called early primary or secondary graft failure (GF). The risk of profound GF has not declined in the past decade, as the consequence of the liberalisation of donor acceptance criteria because of the scarcity of donors. It is therefore important to try to diagnose graft failure and recognise the mechanisms of early graft dysfunction.

Heart transplant recipients require serial assessment of coronary arteries due to a risk of cardiac allograft vasculopathy or atherosclerosis. Currently available non-invasive imaging methods are of a limited value for the detection of coronary stenoses, and thus invasive coronary angiography (ICA) is recommended.