Background: The prevalence of chronic heart failure (CHF) rises steeply in the decades of age and is around 3,000 hospital admissions per 100,000 population for patients> 75 years. 250,000 hospital admissions per year in Germany are assigned to the diagnosis CHF. The overall mortality of CHF in NYHA Stage IV is more than 50%. A heart transplant is the most sophisticated curative approach for the treatment of chronic heart failure (CHF), which has been exhausted by drugs and mechanics.
Due to the increasing aging of the population, we asked ourselves whether older patients still benefit from a heart transplant (HTx).
Methods: In this study, 31 patients were included in our HTx consultation and followed up with regard to survival time after HTx. The analysis with regard to a potential age dependency of survival was carried out with the help of receiver-operator characteristics (ROC). The software SPSS (Version 11.0, Chicago, Illinois, USA) was used for the analysis.
Results: The 31 evaluated patients (29 male, 2 female) were on average 52.5 ± 9.0 years old at the time of HTx (range 38 years, minimum 30 years, maximum 68 years).
The mean survival rate of the HTx patients was 111.5 ± 28.7 months (range 151 months, minimum 57 months, maximum 208 months).
The age between the survivors and the deceased did not differ significantly (survival [n = 22] 52.3 ± 9.8 years, deceased [n = 9] 53.1 ± 7.3 years, p = 0.8).
The division of the patients into patients ≥ 60 years and <60 years at the time of transplantation showed no significant differences in survival (108.8 ± 23.2 months [n = 19] vs. 115.7 ± 36.5 [n = 12 ], p = 0.5).
The ROC analysis showed that the null hypothesis of a difference in outcome across different age groups had to be rejected. The area under the curve (AUC) was 0.52 (95% confidence interval for AUC 0.30-0.73, p = 0.9).
Conclusion: As the outcome of the HTx patients was not age-dependent in the present analysis, the older patient after HTX does not seem to have any worse chances of survival than the younger patient after HTX.
 

Title

Clinical Research in Cardiology

Publisher

D. Steinkopff-Verlag

Publisher Country

Germany

Indexing

Thomson Reuters

Impact Factor

5.2

Publication Type

Both (Printed and Online)

Volume

97

Year

2008

Pages

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