Heart transplantation

Heart transplantation
Intervention
Diagram illustrating the placement of a donor heart in an orthotopic procedure. Notice how the back of the patient's left atrium and great vessels are left in place.
ICD-9-CM	37.51
MeSH	D016027
MedlinePlus	003003
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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 when other medical or surgical treatments have failed. As of 2016, the most common procedure is to take a functioning heart (with or without transplantation of a lung or lungs; a cadaveric donor cardiectomy) from a recently deceased organ donor (the cadaveric allograft), and implant it into the patient. The patient's own heart is either removed (the cardiectomy for the recipient) and replaced with the donor heart (orthotopic procedure) or, less commonly, the recipient's diseased heart is left in place to support the donor heart (heterotopic procedure). Approximately 3500 heart transplants are performed every year in the world, more than half of which occur in the US. Post-operation survival periods average 15 years. Heart transplantation is not considered to be a cure for heart disease, but a life-saving treatment intended to improve the quality of life for recipients.

One of the first mentions of the possibility of heart transplantation was by American medical researcher Simon Flexner, who declared in a reading of his paper on “Tendencies in Pathology” in the University of Chicago in 1907 that it would be possible in the then-future for diseased human organs substitution for healthy ones by surgery — including arteries, stomach, kidneys and heart.

Norman Shumway is widely regarded as the father of heart transplantation although the world's first adult human heart transplant was performed by a South African cardiac surgeon, Christiaan Barnard, utilizing the techniques developed and perfected by Shumway and Richard Lower. Barnard performed the first transplant on Louis Washkansky on December 3, 1967, at the Groote Schuur Hospital in Cape Town, South Africa.Adrian Kantrowitz performed the world's first pediatric heart transplant on December 6, 1967, at Maimonides Hospital in Brooklyn, New York, barely three days after Christiaan Barnard's pioneering operation. Since the 19-day-old infant died little more than six hours after receiving the heart, this operation was considered a failure.Norman Shumway performed the first adult heart transplant in the United States on January 6, 1968, at the Stanford University Hospital.