Heart Transplant

Heart Transplant

What is a heart transplant? A heart transplant is surgery that removes a diseased heart and replaces it with a healthy heart from someone who is deceased, and is also a donor, to improve someone’s quality of life and increase their lifespan. Heart transplants give many people the ability to live their lives to the fullest, but in order to be able to get a heart transplant the patient has to be on a heart transplant list.

Why is a heart transplant needed?

There a huge number of reasons of why a heart transplant would be needed but the most common reason for one is that one or both ventricles are not functioning right and severe heart failure could be happening. Ventricular failure can happen in many forms of congenital heart disease, which is but it is more common in congenital defects with a single ventricle or if long-standing valve obstruction or leakage has led to irreversible heart failure. Children that have had the Fontan procedure, which helps congenital heart defects, may need a heart transplant because the blood flow through the venous system is slow and the veins are congested, which can lead to swelling, fluid accumulation, and protein loss.

How does it affect the heart?

The donor heart is matched to the recipient by blood type and body size. As the heart transplant recipient, they must take medications to prevent his or her immune system from rejecting the new heart. These drugs are called immunosuppressive medication. A medical team will balance the amount of immunosuppressive medication the patient needs to prevent rejection of the new heart with the risk of side effects, which include infection or cancer. In the show Grey’s Anatomy, one of the episodes showed a great example of a heart transplant. One of the patients, a middle aged man, had been suffering from a heart disease for many years and desperately needed a heart. Another patient had deceased in the hospital and he was a perfect match. They then operated and saved the man's life. He lived a healthy life without anymore trouble, he was able to breathe and was able to return to his daily activity and even do more than what he was able to do.

Organ Donation

Organ donation is a huge part of the heart transplant procedure. Without organ donation, heart transplant surgeries