Results of Cardiac Transplantation and Factors Influencing Survival based on the Collaborative Heart Transplant Study

Abstract

This report provides an overview of transplant results obtained during the past 10 years at centers participating in the Collaborative Transplant Study. The Collaborative Transplant Study was initiated for renal transplants in 1982 and extended to cardiac transplants in 1984. Rather than aiming at being a comprehensive registry for worldwide transplantation activities, the Collaborative Transplant Study was intended from the outset to be a scientific registry. Its aim was to identify and characterize factors that influence graft outcome, associated with the hope that knowledge concerning such factors would be useful for improving the results of future transplantations. Anticipation that meaningful results would be obtained more rapidly if many transplant centers cooperated formed the basis for a collaborative multicenter approach. Remarkably, 104 transplant centers in 23 countries are currently participating in the study, expending considerable resources on the collection of data and reporting them to the study center at the University of Heidelberg.