Heart transplantation in Russia and the world

Among the transplantation of various organs for the frequency of cardiac transplant surgery is second only to kidney transplantation. To use such operations more often in practice became possible due to the improvement of methods of organ conservation, the technique of artificial circulation, suppression of modern rejection reaction with the help of modern drugs. Heart transplantation is carried out at the thermal stage of chronic ischemic heart disease, cardiomyopathy with severe heart failure, severe combined heart defects.

The first experiments

The first heart transplantation on the neck of the dog was made in 1905. At the same time, the heart vessels were connected to the ends of the jugular vein and carotid artery. Later, heart transplant was also applied to the pleural region, to the thigh, and so on. In 1941, N.P. Sinitsyn performed the world's first transplant of an additional heart to a frog. And in 1961 the method of orthotopic transplantation was developed. The heart was removed at the level of the atria, and then the donor heart was sutured to the left atrium walls and the atrial septum, after which the roots of the aorta of the donor heart and pulmonary artery were anastomosed (connected) to the vascular trunks.

The first clinical heart transplant

In 1964, a man who was dying of myocardial infarction, a cardiac surgeon from America named James Hardy transplanted the heart of a monkey. However, the organ stopped working after 90 minutes. And in 1967 another physician performed the first clinical allotransplantation of the heart (transplant from person to person), but the patient died after 17 days. After that, doctors from foreign clinics began to massively carry out such transplantations, but the results were often unsatisfactory. Therefore, soon heart transplantation became less frequent. It was also connected with the moral and ethical aspects. The most successful heart transplant was performed in the clinic at Stanford University (USA). Currently, in this and other large clinics continue to intensively study the various nuances of heart transplantation, including seeking methods of maintaining the viability of the organ that has already stopped, and restoring its contractile function. There are also researches in the field of artificial heart creation .

Heart transplant in Russia

Because of the frequent rejection in our country until the eighties of the last century, heart transplantation was practically not performed. But after the invention of the drug "Ciclosporin" in 1980, warning the rejection of the transplanted organ, heart transplantation has become quite widely used in domestic medicine. So, the first successful transplantation was performed by surgeon V. Shumakov in 1987. Now science has gone far ahead, and a fantastic operation for that time today has become commonplace. Not so long ago, heart transplantation required him to stop and connect to the artificial circulation, and now the entire process is carried out with a beating heart.