Immunosuppressive Therapy After Cardiac Transplantation

In contrast to renal or pancreas transplantation graft failure after heart transplantation (HTx) is associated with the death of the patient if re-grafting or mechanical support (MCS) is not possible immediately. Since the beginning of modern transplantation medicine one of the highest priorities were preventing and treating graft rejection. Over the last decades experimental, animal and clinical research resulted in the development of new immunosuppressive (IS) drugs leading to an improved patient and graft survival. The efforts of transplant professions to develop new IS protocols trying to reduce the toxic side effects, resulted in an improvement of quality of life (QoL) for transplant recipients.