Cardiovascular Program

Transplantation of human heart valves has been successfully performed since the early 1960's. Now heart valve transplantation becomes an important life-saving operation in cardiovascular surgery. Like most emerging technologies, there have been continual improvements over the years in both the methods of heart valve cryopreservation and the surgical techniques of implantation. Data from detailed clinical trials suggests that cryopreserved human heart valves have many advantages over mechanical vales or porcine heart valve heterografts. Human valves have normal hemodynamic function, lower incidence of calcification and infection, and therefore reduced chance of re-operation over the long term. Furthermore, human valves require no anticoagulation therapy as do patient with mechanical vale replacement. Cryopreserved human valves have become the valves of choice for many patients, especially for children, women of childbearing years and others who could not tolerate repeated surgeries or anticoagulation regiments.

Tissue banking specialists in Comprehensive Tissue Centre retrieve the heart, sometimes including the descending aorta and pericardium from a cadaver donor. The donor age criteria for heart valves is newborn to 60 years for male or female. The donor heart must be retrieved within 24 hours if the cadaveric donor was refrigerated within 12 hours after death, or must retrieved within 15 hours if the donor was not refrigerated. The heart will be procured aseptically in an operating room setting.

In comprehensive Tissue Centre laboratory, the procured heart is aseptically processed into aortic and pulmonary valves or non-valved conduits with proper evaluation and measurements, the descending aorta into conduit or patches, and the pericardium into patches. All processed grafts will be in antibiotic disinfection solution for 24± 2 hours. After disinfection, the graft will be packaged separately in cryopreservative and frozen using an automatic rate-controlled freezing device. The valves and other cardiovascular grafts are then stored in liquid nitrogen at below -100° C. The expiration of the cryopreserved cardiovascular grafts is 10 years after cryopreservation.

Comprehensive Tissue Centre
 
 

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