What is a heart transplant?
In instances when the heart becomes so weak that conventional medical treatment has little impact, heart transplantation becomes a treatment option for survival. Heart transplantation at the Inova Heart Center can significantly reduce the symptoms and increase the survival rate of individuals with severe heart failure.
How are heart transplant recipients selected?
Most recipients of heart transplants are suffering from end-stage congestive heart failure with severe symptoms. Without a heart transplant, their survival time would be extremely limited. The main causes of this type of severe congestive heart failure are coronary artery disease and heart muscle weakness (cardiomyopathy), although some heart transplants are now being done for congenital heart disease.
Patients are carefully evaluated to determine who is an appropriate candidate for heart transplantation.
The criteria may change as new techniques, innovations or medical technology are introduced.
If a patient is selected to be on the waiting list for a heart transplant, and a donor heart becomes available, blood typing and other factors determine the appropriate recipient. When an appropriate donor/recipient match has been made, the donor and recipient are prepared for surgery and the transplant operation takes place. This is only the beginning.
After the transplant procedure takes place, the two major areas of concern are preventing and diagnosing possible rejection of the donor heart by the recipient's body, and avoiding infections. Rejection occurs when the recipient's immune system recognizes the donated organ as an alien substance and begins attacking and trying to destroy the "intruder." To reduce the possibility of rejection, the immune system is suppressed with cyclosporine and other medications. Heart transplant patients are followed on a regular basis through routine clinic visits and biopsies that detect rejection and infection.
Heart transplantation has come to be an effective and beneficial treatment for individuals who, without the surgery, would have lived for only a few months.
For more information about the Transplant Center at the Inova Heart Center, click here.
For more information about outcomes at the Transplant Center at the Inova Heart Center, click here.