Heart Transplant Evaluation and Listing Criteria (Links)

[NoCrash]

A follow-up for folks undergoing transplant evaluations:

While I was going through my own evaluations I found a number of the test results to be somewhere outside the normal range reported for the test. It turns out the "non-normal" results were because of on-going heart failure issues and that the transplant centers recognize these cases and allow for them in their determinations. For example, the pulmonary function test may reveal a (hopefully mild) asthma condition; this asthma is accepted as an affect of cardiomyopathy and is quite common in folks on the transplant list.

In short, if you find a test result falls a little outside of the reported normal range then you shouldn't let yourself get too worked-up over it (at least not before talking to your cardiologist about it!) It is quite possible that such a result may be quite typical for someone in perfectly good health other than needing a heart transplant.

Regards,
Rob

[NoCrash]

Thought I'd post two links I ran across while doing some internet-based research (with many thanks to Laoshur/Rhoda for the pointer to Google Scholar.)

The first article discusses cardiac transplantation requirements, evaluation tests and evaluation criteria. Very useful in understanding what's going-on during the screening tests. The pointer is to an Acrobat Reader (pdf) file.

Cardiac Transplantation (Deng, 2002)

The second article describes listing criteria and was published in 1998. There is overlap with the first article and I'm not sure if some of these criteria are a little out-of-date, or not, but still useful info.

Listing Criteria for Cardiac Transplantation (Miller, 1998)

Regards,
Rob Thomas