Heart transplantation is a golden standard for the treatment of terminal heart failure. The major cause of death in late posttransplant period is cardiac allograft vasculopathy (CAV). This posttransplant complication develops slowly over several years, and when diagnosed either by conventional coronary angiography or due to graft failure, it is often too advanced and difficult to treat since it is diffuse coronary artery disease. Therefore, early prevention of CAV is a subject of major interest in the transplant cardiology. Since CAV is associated with immune factors, immunomodulatory therapeutic options, like extracorporeal photopheresis are lately being investigated. Unlike conventional coronary angiography, optical coherence tomography (OCT) is able to detect the development of CAV in the earliest phase, i.e. even in the first post-transplant year. In our study, we plan to investigate the prophylactic effect of extracorporeal photopheresis in the early development of cardiac graft vasculopathy detected by OCT.
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Prevention of cardiac allograft vasculopathy detected by optical coherence tomography
Timeframe: One year