Lisbon, Portugal – 7 December 2017: Cardiovascular imaging identifies heart transplant graft rejection before symptoms occur, according to research presented today at EuroEcho-Imaging 2017.1 Early identification could lead to improved treatment and prevent progression to graft failure.
“Despite advances in immunosuppressive therapy, graft rejection is a significant cause of mortality and morbidity after heart transplant,” said lead author Dr Filipa Cordeiro, a cardiology fellow in the Department of Cardiovascular Diseases, University Hospital Leuven, Belgium. “However, symptoms only occur when heart damage is already extensive and there is left ventricular dysfunction.”
Endomyocardial biopsy is the gold standard surveillance test to detect graft rejection. It is performed frequently in the first year after heart transplant, but after that it is only done when there is a clinical suspicion of graft rejection. A non-invasive screening test is needed to detect graft rejection earlier and avoid the possible complications associated with endomyocardial biopsy.
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The goal of this study was to investigate whether humoral and cellular graft rejection, which are the two types of graft rejection, are preceded by changes in transthoracic echocardiography measurements – in particular, strain imaging. If this was the case, clinicians could decide early in the occurrence of subclinical rejection to perform endomyocardial biopsy and if necessary to begin treatment.
The researchers reviewed the medical records of 316 consecutive patients who had a heart transplant between 2003 and 2016 in a single centre to identify episodes of severe cellular or humoral graft rejection.2
A total of 17 patients with severe graft rejection were included in the study, including ten with cellular and seven with humoral graft rejection. Each heart transplant patient with severe graft rejection was matched to a control heart transplant patient without graft rejection by transplant age, donor age, and ischaemic time, giving a control group of 17 patients.
Echocardiography measurements from the moment of graft rejection and approximately three, six, and 12 months before were analysed and compared between groups.
The researchers found that at the moment of acute graft rejection, patients with humoral graft rejection had worse values of global longitudinal strain, circumferential strain, and left ventricular ejection fraction compared to controls and to heart transplant patients with cellular graft rejection.
