Online Focus Groups with Parents And Adolescents with Heart Transplants: Challenges and Opportunities.

Pediatric heart transplant recipients are scarce and widely dispersed. Previous studies of adolescents in this population were limited to small homogenous samples. Although online focus groups are an emerging data collection method, its use in pediatric populations has not been fully realized.

Transition to self-management after pediatric heart transplant.

Context: Little is known about adolescent transition to self-management after heart transplant. This gap in knowledge is critically important because the consequences of poor self-management are costly and life-threatening, often resulting in nonadherence, rejection, repeated hospitalizations, and poor quality of life.

Objective: To explore how adolescents and parents perceive their roles in self-management, and how adolescents integrate self-management into their daily lives and navigate the transition from parent-dominated to self-management.

ABO-incompatible heart transplantation: analysis of the Pediatric Heart Transplant Study (PHTS) database.

Background: ABO incompatible (ABOi) heart transplantation is an accepted approach to increasing organ availability for young patients. Previous studies have suggested that early survival for ABOi transplants is similar to ABO compatible (ABOc) transplants. We analyzed the Pediatric Heart Transplant Study (PHTS) database from 1/96 to 12/08 to further assess this strategy.