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 DESCRIPTION
It is a procedure that has been done for more than 20 years, successfully crescent, and that at present is carried out in many hospitals of the whole world.
CANDIDATES FOR TRANSPLANTE OF HEART
It is not a solution for all the problems of heart, obviously. In fact, it can only be carried out in a very small number of patients who have less than 55-60 years, with some very certain cardiac illnesses that limit drastically his life expectancy, to not more than 2 ó 3 years, who have all the other vital organs in the excellent state (particularly the kidneys, the liver and the lungs), who are very stable emotionally and who have a very collaborating family.
PROCEDURE
One tries to find a heart first donor, who generally will come from a dead healthy person in accident, without injuries that they affect to the heart. The above mentioned heart donor is transported in a special solution with the whole possible speed up to the receiving patient, whose thoracic cavity will be already opened and without the sick heart. The new organ puts itself in the place of that one. The transplante, like any major surgery of the heart, is done under general anesthesia, and the intervention usually lasts several hours, during part of which, the function of the heart and the lungs must be assumed by a machine of extracorporeal circulation.
THE REJECTION
In many transplant of organs, it happens that the immune system of the recipient recognizes the transplanted textile like strange or foreign after itself, and produces antibodies to attack the "invader". For it, after transplant of organs it is necessary to take medicines that suppress the normal immune answer (immunosuppressants), and some of them of for life. Since they diminish the aptitude of the organism to recognize and to resist infections, the individual dose must fit with all care.
THE RECOVERY
When one transplants of heart it is successful, most of the recipients recover up to taking a relatively normal life. Their 80 % lives actively after one year, and some recipients have lived through more than one decade after the transplante.
Anyway, the procedure is complicated, and so that it is successful it needs a very well organized team of specialists in transplantes and a motivated patient. In almost all the cases, it is necessary to keep on seeing the members of the team of transplantes of for life, for the careful adjustment of the individual doses of medicines, the treatment of the complications and, enclosed, the achievement of biopsies of heart to watch the possibility of a rejection.
For all this, the heart transplante is only a solution in the cases in which it is the only life expectancy and in which there are real success probabilities.
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DESCRIPTION 
