14 HEART HEALTH | 2019 | www.elitecme.com T wo recently published studies by Stanford University are propos- ing a new approach to screening and qualifying more people to be eligible heart donors. They’re including those who had an active hepatitis C infection or were diagnosed with obesity before their death. “In order to meet the recipient demands of heart transplantation, we need to consider out-of- the-box strategies to expand the donor Cardiovascular Health Update Researchers suggest expanding criteria for heart donation candidates. Hepatitis c and obesity patients shouldn’t be excluded, according to new research. By Joe Darrah pool,” said Yas Moayedi, MD, a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford, in a statement recently released by the American Heart Association (AHA). Moayedi, the lead author of one of the studies, which has been published in Circulation: Heart Failure, the journal of the AHA, is among a group of researchers who used a national registry of organ transplants to analyze data from 2014-17 on more than 1,300 heartdonorslivingwithhepatitisC.Theresults showed that only 5 percent of infected hearts were used in transplants and that those recip- ients had no difference in survival within the first year of transplant compared with patients who received hearts from donors without hep- atitis C — which can be effectively treated with antiviral medication. (Longer-term data is needed to confirm the positive results persist, according to the AHA.) The number of hepa- HEALTH UPDATE  |