The waiting list for donor hearts has stabilized in the Netherlands for the first time in years, thanks to a new technique for storing hearts after the death of a patient. This is evident from figures from the Dutch Transplantation Foundation (NTS). were published on Monday. Sixty so-called ‘DCD hearts’ have been transplanted since 2021. “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,” said Michiel Erasmus, heart-lung surgeon at UMC Groningen.
The ‘heart in a box‘-method was developed in the United States and was first used in 2020. In this method, the heart of a deceased donor is removed from the body and connected to a machine that mimics the conditions of the human body. Oxygen-rich blood from the donor is pumped through the heart at body temperature, so that the muscle continues to pump and does not die from oxygen deprivation. Previously, it was only possible to transplant the heart of a brain-dead (but physically alive) donor to a recipient, but deceased patients are now also eligible. This method allows more hearts to be donated and makes it possible to store them for longer periods – up to eight hours – and to transport them over longer distances.
In June 2021, the first heart transplant via a ‘heart in a box‘ machine performed in the Netherlands, in the UMC Utrecht. According to the NTS, the waiting list for a donor heart had been growing for years, causing one in seven people on the waiting list to die. At the end of July 2023, 164 people were still on the list. A year earlier there were 165, and in 2021 there were 120. According to heart-lung surgeon Michiel Erasmus, “the results for the recipient patients are at least as good as with the classic heart donation method”. From 1 January 2024, the treatment in the Netherlands will also be reimbursed in the basic package.