Background: Heart failure is the leading cause of death in grown-up congenital heart disease patients (GUCH). Although heart transplantation (OHT) remains the gold standard in end-stage heart failure, the ratio of GUCH patients undergoing this procedure remains low.
Objective: Describe the cohort of GUCH patients undergoing heart transplantation at a third-level hospital.
Background: Considerable effort has been exerted to develop noninvasive diagnostic biomarkers that might replace or reduce the need to perform endomyocardial biopsies. In this context, graft DNA circulating on transplant recipients has been proposed as a potential biomarker of organ rejection or cellular graft injury.
Methods: We propose a digital PCR (dPCR) method based on the amplification of ten specific InDels sufficiently sensitive to detect small amounts of specific donor circulating DNA diluted on the host cell free DNA (cfDNA).
The CentriMag (Levitronix LLC, Waltham, MA, USA) ventricular assist device is a centrifugal pump designed for short-term support in patients with cardiogenic shock. In patients with restrictive physiology, there is some concern about the use of these devices due a very small ventricular cavity. We review the evolution of a 32-year-old woman with restrictive cardiomyopathy, moderate pulmonary hypertension, and severe biventricular systo-diastolic dysfunction in whom a biventricular Centrimag device was implanted due to a progressive clinical worsening.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Mortality among the small percentage of cardiac surgery patients receiving prolonged mechanical ventilation is high, but this issue appears to be inadequately addressed in guidelines.
Methods: This study is a retrospective analysis of prospective, multi-center, and observational study in Spain including all adults undergoing cardiac surgery in 3 Andalusian hospitals between June 2008 and December 2012.
Results: The study included 3,588 adults with mean ± SD age of 63.