The Pros And Cons Of Heart Transplants

First heart transplant was performed in 1967 by Dr. Christiaan Barnard. After that roughly 5,000 heart transplants were performed worldwide each year about 2,000 are performed in the United States (7). Some organs can donate when patient is not braindead, such as kidneys and livers, while on the other hand organs like heart, eyes, pancreases and skin cannot donate when patient is alive. A heart transplant is transplant procedure by surgery where the malfunctioning heart or heart related disease are replaced by a function heart (4). Indeed, these surgeries are often hazardous or successful, also in some case immune system may reject the heart because it is a foreign object. Patients are considered for heart transplant when their heart stops …show more content…
When heart transplant is the only option and patients agree, then patient is listed to transplant list. This involves patients being on the national waiting list maintained by the United Network of Organ sharing(UNOS). “UNOS is a private, non-profit organization coordinates the transplant system in the United States funded by the federal government. UNOS is the organization that administers the transplant network, Organ Procurement and Transplantation Network” (9). One of the responsibilities of UNOS is to maintain the national organ transplant waiting list. The UNOS list include every patient in United States who are waiting for an organ transplant. Also, they have different criteria for each organ. For example, heart transplant UNOS requires doctors to submit a blood type, demographics, cardiopulmonary resuscitation, and many more medical histories. Where for liver transplants patients are require to submit Model for End Stage Liver Disease (MELD) score, demographic information, blood type, diagnosis in order to list patients, and urinary test. Another thing about heart transplant is when an organ becomes available, it first offered to local patients, then to region patients, and national