New research enables more heart donations

Washington: Many hearts are declared unfit for donation due to stress-induced heart failure. But a recent study found that this condition has no bearing on the outcome of a transplant further opening path for up to 30 per cent more heart transplants.
“Systematic utilisation of these hearts would mean a breakthrough for heart transplantation, as more patients could be accepted for transplantation,” said Jonatan Oras, senior lecturer at Sahlgrenska Academy, University of Gothenburg, and specialist physician in anaesthesia and intensive care at the University Hospital.
The study, published in ‘The Journal of Thoracic and Cardiovascular Surgery,’ is based on particulars of 641 potential heart donors in Sweden in the years 2006-2016.
Either these people, who had been declared brain-dead, had said yes to donation during their lives or their survivors had given the go-ahead. As many as 24 per cent of potential donors had acute stress-induced cardiomyopathy, or broken heart syndrome, in which cardiac function is impaired in one part of the heart, while the other parts beat normally. This condition is caused by the massive surge in stress hormones observed in the course of brain death.
The functional impairment appears to be transient: Within a few hours or days, the heart recovers. Nevertheless, there are recommendations that these hearts should not be transplanted.
The selection process, therefore, varies from one location to another. To date, the transplantation centre in Gothenburg has had the favourable clinical experience of transplanting hearts with stress-induced heart failure, and there were 42 such cases in the current study.