Heart Transplants and Advanced Cardiac Therapies

Heart and Heart-Lung Transplants/Advanced Cardiac Therapies

 
Lucile Packard Children's Hospital's heart transplant program is one of the leading children's heart and heart-lung transplant centers in the world and the only one in Northern California. The first adult heart transplant in the United States was at Stanford University Medical Center. 
 
Our transplant team specializes in complicated cases, such as children with severe congenital heart disease, or with pulmonary hypertension, a condition in which the pulmonary arteries supplying blood to the lungs have been damaged irreversibly by high pressure.
 
Our Pediatric Transplantation Team is directed by Dr. Bruce Reitz, who performed the world's first successful heart-lung transplant and has played a pivotal role in continued innovations.
 
In conjunction with our heart transplant program, our doctors have started a new Pediatric Advanced Therapies Clinic. There, doctors are trying a new generation of drug treatments that can help avoid the need for a transplant in children with heart failure. However, if the treatments don't work, the team will conduct an evaluation to determine if a transplant is the best option for the family.

Left Ventricular Assist Device

 
For children who are very ill and awaiting transplant, a new "left ventricular assist device" can help. The device, which is basically a temporary artificial heart, allows children to get out of bed and walk around the hospital while awaiting a transplant, rather than be on a ventilator (a breathing machine) and bedridden.
 
Stanford was the first institution to successfully implant this device (LVAD) and is currently the only site in northern California offering this option as a bridge to transplantation. To date, about a dozen pediatric transplant candidates have received LVADs at Stanford while waiting for transplants.