A single center experience with heart retransplantation: the 29 year experience at a single institution

Abstract

The subject of organ retransplantation has generated a great deal of debate and discussion as physicians, ethicists and health care payers as well as patients address such intrinsically conflicting principles as distributive justice and the drive to maximize individual patient survival. As is the case with other organ allografts, it is inevitable that a certain number of cardiac allograft recipients will redevelop some form of end-stage heart disease and become potential candidates for retransplantation. While there may be no strictly right or wrong answer to the question of whether heart retransplantation should ever be performed, we felt that examining the experience at a single relatively high-volume institution which has performed retransplantation over a several decade period could be instructive both in terms of assessing what the best result to be obtained might be as well as identifying subsets of retransplant candidates with predictable better outcome than others. Thus, we present a retrospective analysis of our institutions 2.9 year experience with cardiac retransplantation.