Heart Transplantation

Heart Transplantation

A heart transplant, or a cardiac transplant, is a surgical transplant procedure performed on patients with end-stage heart failure or severe coronary artery disease. As of 2008 the most common procedure was to take a working heart from a recently deceased organ donor (cadaveric allograft) and implant it into the patient. The patient's own heart is either removed (orthotopic procedure) or, less commonly, left in place to support the donor heart (heterotopic procedure); both were controversial solutions to an enduring human ailment. Post-operation survival periods averaged 15 years.

Norman Shumway is widely regarded as the father of heart transplantation although the world's first adult human heart transplant was performed by Christiaan Barnard in South Africa utilizing the techniques developed and perfected by Norman Shumway and Richard Lower . Christiaan Barnard performed the world's first adult heart transplant on Louis Washkansky on December 3, 1967 at the Groote Schuur Hospital in Cape Town South Africa. Adrian Kantrowitz performed the first pediatric heart transplant in the world on December 6, 1967 at Maimonides Hospital (now Maimonides Medical Center) in Brooklyn, New York barely 3 days after Christiaan Barnard. This was the first heart transplant of any kind in the United States. Norman Shumway performed the first adult transplant in the United States on January 6, 1968 at the Stanford University Hospital.

Worldwide, about 3,500 heart transplants were performed annually. The vast majority of these are performed in the United States (2,000-2,300 annually). About 800,000 people have a Class IV heart defect indicating a new organ. This disparity spurred research into the transplantation of non-human hearts into humans after 1993. Xenografts from other species and man-made artificial hearts are two less successful alternatives to allografts.

The United States has continuously led the world in the annual number of heart transplants performed. Some of the top heart transplant programs in the United States are Cedars Sinai Medical Center, Columbia University Medical Center, Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center, University of Pennsylvania Hospital and Texas Heart Institute. Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, California is the current leader in the number of heart transplants having performed 87 in 2011, the highest for any US Medical Center. The hospital had completed 652 procedures since the program's inception in 1988.