Pediatric heart transplantation

Abstract

As more and more children with congenital heart disease are operated on around the world, a group of them are faced with the limitations on their survival imposed by the type of surgery they faced. Many of those who were candidates for transplantation during the eighties and nineties due to the inoperability of their heart disease (like some variants of left heart hypoplasia) had neonatal surgery as their first option. Therefore, they underwent right ventricular bypass surgeries that limited the life expectancy of some of them. These patients began thus to expand the list of candidates for heart transplantation, changing the profile of pre-transplant diagnoses from the group of cardiomyopathies towards that of congenital heart disease. Pediatric heart transplantation is a fascinating tool for the treatment of end-stage heart disease in a heterogeneous group of patients whose common characteristic is their advanced heart failure, but that have different etiologies and needs that are according to the varied age range that pediatrics entails. This chapter describes the current state of pediatric heart transplantation and its most relevant aspects in this regard and those that determine its results.