Heart Transplants from Severely Obese Donors Show Comparable Outcomes for Patients: New Research

Washington, September 16: Heart transplant patients who received hearts from severely obese donors had similar short-term outcomes and long-term survival as patients who received hearts from non-obese donors, according to new research.

The research has been published in Circulation: Heart Failure, an American Heart Association journal. The waiting list for a heart transplant in the U.S. is continuously about 3,000 people, and only half of those people receive a donor heart within a year. There is an urgent need to expand the pool of potential heart donors; however, transplant centres are hesitant to accept hearts from obese donors.

In the U.S., almost 40 per cent of the adult population is classified as obese, and nearly 8 per cent have severe obesity, which is defined as a body mass index (BMI) greater than or equal to 40. Delhi Doctors From Max Hospital Saves Life of Man with 15% Active Heart.

"As the prevalence of obesity in the U.S. continues to rise, it directly affects the pool of organ donors," said Leora T. Yarboro, M.D., lead study author and associate professor of surgery at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, Virginia. "Since the prevalence of severe obesity has increased significantly over the past 15 years, we wanted to investigate the outcomes of recipients of transplant hearts from donors with severe obesity."

The study used the national United Network for Organ Sharing (UNOS) database to analyze the outcomes of 26,000 heart transplants from 2003-2017. Approximately 900, or 3.5 per cent, of the donors, had severe obesity. Severely obese donors, a BMI? 40, were more likely to be older and female. In addition:

-10 per cent of severely obese donors had diabetes vs. 3 per cent of non-obese donors;-33 per cent of obese donors had hypertension vs. 15 per cent of donors with BMI.