BEATING HEARTS, TOUCHING LIVES – OUR EXPERIENCE CARDIAC TRANSPLANT AT A TERTIARY CARE HOSPITAL

End stage heart failure commonly results in signicant morbidity, need for recurrent hospitalization, decreased quality of life and increased mortality – causing an overall deterioration in the physical and general condition of not only the patient but also the personal caregivers. In such patients and situations, Cardiac Transplantation appears as an effective therapy. With tremendous achievements in theelds of immunosuppression, rejection, and infection, what was once considered an experimental intervention, has now become a routine worldwide treatment. First attempted by Alexis Carrel and Charles Guthrie in 1905 in an animal model, to the rst human cardiac transplant, all be it unsuccessful, using an xenotropic heart from a chimp by James Hardy in 1964, due to restriction in freedom to proceed being in the form of the legal denition of death, with the patient succumbing within an hour of surgery due to hyperacute rejection, to the rst actual human-to-human heart transplant in December 1967 by Christiaan Barnard, from a brain dead young girl to an elderly male, cardiac transplant has now evolved in a [1] multitude of ways to reach the current world scenario .