Heart Transplant Evaluation and Listing Criteria (Links)

[NoCrash]

Thought I'd post two links I ran across while doing some internet-based research (with many thanks to Laoshur/Rhoda for the pointer to Google Scholar.)

The first article discusses cardiac transplantation requirements, evaluation tests and evaluation criteria. Very useful in understanding what's going-on during the screening tests. The pointer is to an Acrobat Reader (pdf) file.

Cardiac Transplantation (Deng, 2002) (http://heart.bmjjournals.com/cgi/reprint/87/2/177.pdf)

The second article describes listing criteria and was published in 1998. There is overlap with the first article and I'm not sure if some of these criteria are a little out-of-date, or not, but still useful info.

Listing Criteria for Cardiac Transplantation (Miller, 1998) (http://www.transplantjournal.com/pt/re/transplantation/fulltext.00007890-199810150-00032.htm;jsessionid=Co2TDB1Fe5CKQ47EYm23kjpk8TqWe DIpluTPb8hgguWXSxkXnk1e!-1675635649!-949856031!9001!-1?&fullimage=true)

Regards,
Rob Thomas

[NoCrash]

A follow-up for folks undergoing transplant evaluations:

While I was going through my own evaluations I found a number of the test results to be somewhere outside the normal range reported for the test. It turns out the "non-normal" results were because of on-going heart failure issues and that the transplant centers recognize these cases and allow for them in their determinations. For example, the pulmonary function test may reveal a (hopefully mild) asthma condition; this asthma is accepted as an affect of cardiomyopathy and is quite common in folks on the transplant list.

In short, if you find a test result falls a little outside of the reported normal range then you shouldn't let yourself get too worked-up over it (at least not before talking to your cardiologist about it!) It is quite possible that such a result may be quite typical for someone in perfectly good health other than needing a heart transplant.

Regards,
Rob