Patel works at Montefiore Medical Center and Albert Einstein College of Medicine.
AB Wire
An Indian American researcher, Dr. Snehal Patel, has come up with a new study which finds that a blood test that’s used to check the health of a donor heart may not accurately predict if a heart transplant will be successful.
Placing less emphasis on this blood test could increase the number of hearts available for end-stage heart failure, Patel and her group of researchers said, reported US News & World Report.
“Heart transplantation is an incredible therapy for patients with end-stage heart failure, but there are only 2,000 to 2,400 transplants each year,” said Patel.
“A lot of focus has been on finding ways to sign up more people as organ donors, but there is also a problem in that only an average of one in three donor hearts are placed,” explained Patel.
Patel is an assistant professor of medicine at Montefiore Medical Center and Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York City.
The Washington Post reported for the past couple of decades, many U.S. transplant centers have used a biomarker called troponin as one way to determine whether a donor heart is suitable for implantation. In an organ that is considered otherwise usable, an elevated level of troponin — a protein found in the bloodstream — is considered a reliable indicator of heart muscle damage. Many transplant centers would reject such a heart.
The problem is that the test’s reliability is based on small studies that showed mixed results, as well as anecdotal information. Using this test may have led to discarding donor hearts that would have functioned well, even as the waiting list for a heart grows.
More than 4,100 people need a heart transplant, according to the United Network for Organ Sharing, the nonprofit organization that runs the U.S. organ procurement and transplantation network, but only one in three donor hearts is judged acceptable.
“Now the first large-scale study of troponin as a biomarker for donor hearts has found that there is no difference in patient survival or typical post-transplant complications when donors have elevated levels of the biomarker”, reported the Post, on Patel’s study.
Widespread use of those hearts would provide a small increase in the availability of the organs, perhaps 70 or 80 each year, according to the physician who led the study. Last year, 2,804 heart transplants were performed in the United States.
The researchers looked at 10,943 recipients of hearts whose donors had high levels of troponin in their blood between 2007 and 2014. In addition to survival rates, the researchers considered rates of primary graft failure — a severe dysfunction of the transplanted heart — and cardiac allograft vasculopathy — an aggressive form of coronary artery disease — that are both complications after transplants. Researchers found no association between high levels of the biomarker and those conditions.