Cardiac surgeons recently performed the 100th heart transplant at the Almazov National Medical Research Centre.
The milestone donor heart transplant was performed on March 26, 2018. The procedure went smoothly, without complications. The patient’s condition is satisfactory, he is on immunosuppressive therapy and has started doing physiotherapy exercises. Once the early postoperative period is over, the doctors will be more certain about the long-term outcomes.
Specialists tend to look at such milestones with a skeptical frown: it is quality, not quantity, of transplants that matters. However, to achieve this number, the team of the Almazov Centre has come a long way since January 2010 when they performed their first heart transplant in St. Petersburg.
The surgery itself is just one facet of teamwork by all the departments involved in the implementation of the heart transplant programme at the Almazov Centre. Over the last 8 years, the Centre has made a great effort to create the transplantation service. They have put in place a system for the selection of donors and recipients—patients with chronic heart failure, have optimized the interaction between various research laboratories and departments of the Center as well as clinical and diagnostic departments for preoperative preparation and postoperative management of patients. Biologists, geneticists, chemists and pharmacologists have been engaged in addition to cardiologists, cardiac surgeons and anesthesiologists/reanimatologists. The average waiting time for a transplant is 3 to 4 months (or sometimes 6 months), depending a lot on the blood group and anatomical compatibility between the donor heart and the recipient.
“Today, we can state that such an expensive type of high-tech medical care as cardiac transplantation is a well-established procedure in St. Petersburg and in the Northwestern Federal District in general. These transplants have become somewhat routine procedures for the Almazov Centre and are performed with anticipated success. This could only be achieved in a specialized facility where transplants are performed regularly. In the last three years, we have been performing an average of 20 procedures per year,” said Prof. Mikhail Gordeev, Chief Cardiac Surgeon at the Almazov Centre, Head of Cardiothoracic Surgery Research Department and Chief Cardiovascular Surgeon of the Northwestern Federal District.