EST Sick Kids study offers new hope for infants awaiting heart transplantation Researchers at The Hospital for Sick Children have discovered that infant heart transplants can be performed safely and successfully despite major blood type incompatibility between the donor and recipient. The study, published in the March 15 issue of The New England Journal of Medicine, challenges current clinical thinking about the human immune system and offers new hope for infants waiting for heart transplantation.
Newborns requiring heart transplantation often die because of the critical shortage of donor hearts.
Efficient allocation of the rarely available organs is hampered by the presumed need for a recipient who is ABO-compatible with the donor. Babies with blood group O encounter disproportionate competition for organs, whereas organs from donors with the less common B and AB blood types may go unused if there is no recipient of appropriate size and compatible blood type on the waiting list. The overall survival of the recipients of ABO-incompatible donor hearts was 80 per cent. The two children that died, died of causes unrelated to ABO-compatibility. The expanded donor pool afforded by this protocol contributed to a decrease in waiting list deaths from 58 to seven per cent.