Pediatric and congenital heart transplant: twenty-year experience in a tertiary Brazilian hospital.

Introduction: Cardiac transplantation remains the gold standard for end-stage cardiomyopathies and congenital heart defects in pediatric patients.

Objective: This study aims to report on 20 years of experience since the first case and evaluate our results.

Methods: We conducted a retrospective analysis of the database and outpatient follow-up. Between October 1992 and April 2012, 109 patients underwent 114 transplants. 51.8% of them being female. The age of patients ranged from 12 days to 21 years with a mean of 8.8±5.7 years and a median of 5.2 years. The underlying diagnosis was dilated cardiomyopathy in 61.5%, congenital heart disease in 26.6% and restrictive cardiomyopathy in 11.9%. All patients above 17 years old had congenital heart disease.

Results: Survival rate at 30 days, 1, 5, 10, 15, and 20 years were 90.4%, 81.3%, 70.9%, 60.5%, 44.4% and 26.7%, respectively. Mean cold ischemic time was 187.9 minutes and it did not correlate with mortality (P>0.05). Infectious complications and rejection episodes were the most common complications (P<0.0001), occurring, respectively, in 66% and 57.4% of the survivors after 10 years. There was no incidence of graft vascular disease and lymphoproliferative disease at year one, but they affected, respectively, 7.4% and 11% of patients within 10 years.

Conclusion: Twenty-year pediatric heart transplant results at our institution were quite satisfactory and complication rates were acceptable.