What is Cardiac Transplantation ?
Cardiac Transplantation : The first successful clinical heart transplant was done by Christian Bmnard at Cape Town in South Africa in 1967. The initial enthusiasm did no1 last long as methods of immuno suppression were not available. Research at Stanford University led to two significant advances - drugs for immuno suppression and percutaneous endo myocardial biopsy for diagnosis of early rejection. In 1982, International Society of Heart and Lung Transplantation (ISHLT) was formed and it keeps an international registry. Data for more than 62,000 heart transplantations done all over the world is available. Currently early 4000 cardiac transplantation are done worldwide every yea, most of them in the U.S.