Yasuhiro Shudo

By Yasuhiro Shudo

There remains a significant shortage of donor hearts despite an ever-increasing demand. In an effort to maximize the utilization of this scarce resource, extended criteria for donor hearts with surgically correctable abnormalities should be considered. Bench valve surgery on the donor heart prior to heart transplantation is feasible, and its implementation could enable the use of previously unsalvageable hearts, thus expanding the donor organ pool. With proper donor and recipient selection, bench valve surgery will enable the expansion of the donor pool to provide high-quality donor allografts that would otherwise have been declined. This chapter reviews the current practices employed in heart transplantation, with emphasis on the surgical technique for concomitant valve surgery in the donor heart prior to transplantation.

Part of the book: Heart Valve Surgery

By Chawannuch Ruaengsri, Daniel M. Bethencourt, Tiffany Koyano and Yasuhiro Shudo

Heart transplant remains the gold standard of end-stage heart failure treatment. The number of heart transplants performed each year has increased and the number of recipient candidates has been increasing even more. As a result, recipients are now matched with donors over longer distances with increasing organ ischemic time. Organ preservation strategies have been evolving to minimize ischemia reperfusion injury following longer ischemic times. This chapter will include updated organ donation and preservation techniques for heart transplant including organ donation after brain death (DBD) and donation after circulatory death (DCD). The expansion of cardiac donation after circulatory death (DCD) and new techniques for heart preservation may increase the use of hearts from extended criteria donors and thus expand the heart donor pool.

Part of the book: End Stage Therapy and Heart Transplantation