The Pros And Cons Of A Heart Transplant

Not every patient that suffers from a heart failure is a candidate for a heart transplant. Some patients are sometimes too sick or have other medical issues that will not allow their transplant to be successful. In order to determine whether the patient is a candidate for a heart transplant, their medical condition must meet the requirements of the transplant team. Other tests may also be performed such as: echocardiogram, coronary angiogram or peak VO2 assessment. Echocardiogram measures the heart’s squeezing ability. The test is non-invasive, sound waves are used to make an image of the beating heart. The test only takes fifteen minutes to perform and determine the patient’s heart ability to squeeze. The coronary angiogram and peak VO2 …show more content…
The surgeon the makes an incision to expose the breastbone and saws through the middle breastbone that allows him to pull the ribs of the infant out of the way in order to expose the heart. Then the infant is attached to a heart-lung machine that is responsible for adding oxygen, removing carbon dioxide, and circulating the blood until the new heart is inserted. The patient is then injected with anticoagulants that help prevent blood from clotting in the heart-lung machine. The surgeon attaches two tubes to the right side of the infant’s heart that will collect unoxygenated blood, and two other tubes to the aorta that return oxygenated blood. The heart-lung machine’s main function is to regulate the body temperature of the patient by keeping the blood warm or cool. The machine will cause the body temperature to be cooled at 78 degrees Fahrenheit to prevent the damage of other organs during surgery. The heart is then removed from the patient’s body and the donor heart is removed from the bag. Anastomosis is then performed, which is the process in which the donor heart’s blood vessels are then connected to the patient’s blood vessels. The procedure requires great surgical skills to make a good, tight anastomosis at one of the highest expressions of the surgeon’s art. The surgeons then make sure that there are no bubbles in the new heart to make the final connections. The heart then starts contracting or is shocked by the surgeons to get it going. As the heart is shocked the surgeons use the machine to warm the infant’s body to its normal temperature. The new heart will not have normal connections to the nervous system of the infant because they have been served when the old heart was removed and cannot be reattached. As the heart is beating well the patient is removed from the heart-lung machine and the