When is a heart transplant necessary?

When is a heart transplant necessary?

Rose Marie Robertson, MD, FAHA, FACC, FESC (Chief Science Officer and Past President of the Board of American Heart Association) gives expert video advice on: When is a heart transplant necessary?; Is angioplasty overused to treat coronary heart disease?; Are there alternative methods for treating heart disease? and more...

Heart transplantation is an effective way of treating end-stage heart failure. Patients really only need a heart transplant and are only referred for it when their heart disease is so serious that, without heart transplantation, they would die in a relatively short period of time - something like six months or so. It's difficult to find hearts for transplantation, and so we limit heart transplantation only to those patients who really are desperately in need of it. In general, heart transplants are needed when patients are in severe heart failure, sometimes because of coronary artery disease and either severe or multiple heart attacks, sometimes because of valvular heart disease, and sometimes because of heart muscle disease or cardiomyopathy.