Anxiety, depressive symptoms and heart transplantation

Abstract

For patients suffering from terminal heart failure, orthotopic heart transplantation has become an established means of treatment. So far, over 50000 heart transplantations (HTx) have been performed in 271 transplantation centres around the world. It has been demonstrated that 1-year survival rates are over 80 percent; the mean survival time for HTx-patients has reached nearly 10 years, with a consecutive yearly mortality rate of 4 percent [1]. As a consequence, an increasing number of patients are reaching a long-time survival of more than 10 years [2], [3]. © 2006 Springer-Verlag Milan.