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heart transplant

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heart transplant

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Also known as heart transplantation, cardiac transplant

surgical transplant procedure performed on patients with end-stage heart failure or severe coronary artery disease in which a new heart is implanted

Key facts

Specialty
Cardiology
Mesh
D016027
Medlineplus
003003

via Wikipedia infobox

Research

108,300 papers

via PubMed

Wikidata facts

Image
Heart transplant.jpg
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Commons category
Heart transplantation
health specialty
cardiology
quantity
467
class of object(s) of occurrence
heart
Sources (4)

via Wikidata · CC0

~13 min read

Encyclopedic overview

A heart transplant, or a cardiac transplant, is a surgical transplant procedure performed on patients with end-stage heart failure when other medical or surgical treatments have failed. As of 2018, the most common procedure is to take a functioning heart from a recently deceased organ donor (brain death is the most common) and implant it into the patient. The patient's own heart is either removed and replaced with the donor heart (orthotopic procedure) or, much less commonly, the recipient's diseased heart is left in place to support the donor heart (heterotopic, or "piggyback", transplant procedure).

Approximately 5,000 heart transplants are performed each year worldwide, more than half of which are in the US. Post-operative survival periods average 15 years. Heart transplantation is not considered to be a cure for heart disease; rather it is a life-saving treatment intended to improve the quality and duration of life for a recipient.

Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “heart transplant” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.

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