Transplant vasculopathy

Abstract

Transplant vasculopathy constitutes the major impediment to long-term survival in heart transplant recipients. Within the "response to immune injury" paradigm, it can best be understood as the resultant of an orchestrated recipient immune response to the initial allogenic stimulus by graft vascular endothelium. This response incorporates the elaboration of complex coordinated cytokine patterns and corresponding cell types including B-lymphocytes, T-helper1- and T-helper2-cells, cytotoxic T-cells, macrophages, and polymorphonuclear cells. These attack the alloantigenic vascular endothelium and lead, by complex cytokine signaling, to migration of donor smooth muscle cells from the media into the intima, associated with a switch from the contractile to a synthetic phenotype. In conjunction with recipient T-cells, macrophages, and lipids, the intimal fibroproliferative growth of the donor vessel is hereby initiated.