Gino Gerosa, Paolo Zanatta, Annalisa Angelini, Marny Fedrigo, Roberto Bianco, Demetrio Pittarello, Tea Lena, Alessia Pepe, Giuseppe Toscano, Fabio Zanella, Giuseppe Feltrin, Nicola Pradegan, Vincenzo Tarzia
A 45 year old male obese patient with a previous history of repaired congenital heart disease developed worsening heart failure making heart transplantation listing mandatory. Unfortunately, due to his anthropometric measures, the search for a suitable brain-dead donor was unsuccessful. For this reason, he accepted to be enrolled in the controlled donation after circulatory death (cDCD) program. According to the Italian Law regulating death declaration after cardiac arrest (no-touch period of 20 minutes-one of the longest in the world), we faced a 34 minute cardiac asystole, after which the heart was recovered through a thoraco-abdominal normothermic regional perfusion excluding the epiaortic vessels...
February 9, 2024: ASAIO Journal: a Peer-reviewed Journal of the American Society for Artificial Internal Organs