The future of partial heart transplantation

Abstract

Heart valve replacement in children is an unsolved problem in congenital cardiac surgery because state-of-the-art heart valve implants do not grow. This leads to serial repeat operations to replace outgrown heart valve implants. Partial heart transplantation is a new transplant that helps alleviate this problem by delivering growing heart valve implants. In the future, partial heart transplantation has the potential to complement conventional heart transplantation for treating children with congenital cardiac disease primarily affecting the heart valves.

Keywords: heart valve implant; heart valve replacement; immunosuppression; partial heart transplantation; pediatric transplantation.