Blood-incompatible baby heart transplant seen safe

By Will Dunham

ORLANDO, Fla., Nov 5 (Reuters) - Babies waiting desperately to receive a heart transplant can receive a heart from a donor even if the blood type is incompatible -- good news for infants who might otherwise die, researchers said on Monday.

Heart transplants not compatible with the recipient's blood type were equally safe as transplants with blood-compatible hearts when given to infants up to age 1, they said.

Three years after getting a transplant, children had equal survival rates -- about 75 percent -- whether or not the donor heart was compatible with their blood type, the researchers said at a meeting of the American Heart Association. There was no additional risk of organ rejection, they said. "Pediatric heart transplantation has always suffered from the lack of organ availability. So children who require a heart transplant have always been at a huge disadvantage," Dr. Luca Vricella, chief of pediatric heart transplantation at Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions in Baltimore, said in an interview.

Dr. Vinay Nadkarni of Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, a spokesman for the American Heart Association, said the findings affect babies whose hearts are so sick they are in line for a transplant.

"We know that 40 percent of those babies will not survive long enough to receive a compatible transplant," Nadkarni said. "This gives them the same chance as if they could have had a

(compatible) matched organ."

The average stay on a waiting list exceeds two months.

PREVENTING DEATHS

The safety of these transplants could significantly reduce the number of infants who die because many of them can be given hearts from incompatible donors, said Vricella, who led the study.

The researchers said the children getting the blood group incompatible organs are no more than 12 months old because the immune systems of children who are older tend to be more developed and thus more prone to reject transplanted organs.

The researchers reviewed records on the U.S. infants up to age 1 who have received a heart transplant from 1999 until this year. Data on these operations is reported to the United Network for Organ Sharing, or UNOS.

Of the 591 infants who received such transplants, 35 got hearts from blood-group incompatible donors.

"One way to minimize the wait on the donor list is to make more of the few organs that are there available for children," Vricella said.

"It could have a profound impact on availability of organs simply because you're increasing your donor pool."