The waiting list for a donor heart has been stabilized by a new technique for heart donation, the Dutch Transplant Foundation (NTS) reported on Monday.
Two years ago, the heart of a deceased person was transplanted using this technique for the first time in the Netherlands. Sixty heart transplants have already been performed in this way, thanks in part to close cooperation between UMC Groningen, UMC Utrecht and Erasmus MC, according to the foundation.
With the so-called ‘heart-in-a-box’ technique, a stationary heart is placed in a so-called perfusion machine, after which it starts beating again after the supply of oxygen and blood. Before that, a heart transplant was only possible with a brain-dead donor whose heart was still beating.
Thanks to the new technique, the surgeon has more rest and time to perform the heart transplant, explains Olivier Manintveld (cardiologist at Erasmus MC). “The heart is protected on the perfusion machine. It can be kept for about eight hours before transplanting. By using the machine, we are using hearts that we could never use for transplantation before.”
Basic package
Previously, there was an increasing shortage of donor hearts, as a result of which one in seven people on the waiting list died. “Together with the Dutch Transplant Foundation and Eurotransplant, we drew up a national protocol. All people on the waiting list for a donor heart were asked if they also wanted to receive a heart using the new method. The procedures were performed in the order of the national waiting list,” says heart-lung surgeon at UMC Utrecht Niels van der Kaaij.
“Up to and including June, we have already performed thirty heart transplants in the Netherlands this year, while the norm was forty per year for years,” says Michiel Erasmus (heart-lung surgeon at UMC Groningen).
“If we can perform around sixty heart transplants this year, we will amply exceed that number in 2023. Then we will hopefully also see a decrease in the number of people on the waiting list and in the number of people who die before a suitable donor heart becomes available. And the results for the recipient patients are at least as good as with the classic heart donation method.”
The NTS announces that the Ministry of Health intends to reimburse the treatment from 1 January 2024 from the basic package. The foundation calls that ‘good news’. At the end of July 2023, 164 people were on the waiting list for a donor heart.