Heart Transplantation: New Realities, Challenges and Development- Demographics and Therapeutics

The first human heart transplant performed in South Africa in 1967 by Christiaan Barnard, took considerable advantage of the pioneering experimental work by Alexis Carrel, Frank Mann, Norman Shumway, and Richard Lower [1-4]. The first heart transplant recipient recovered well initially, but died of pneumonia 18 days later. Initial outcomes were poor, due to a limited understanding of early post-operative complications as well as limited measures to detect and treat rejection and opportunistic infections. The second recipient survived for 19 months, but surprisingly died of myocardial infarction. Cardiac allograft vasculopathy was eventually recognized as the cause of this death [3]. In the UK a moratorium on heart transplantation was declared in 1973 to 1980.