Heart Transplantation and Psychology - Do We Need Psychology in Transplant Medicine?

Editorial

Heart transplant procedures have been performed for almost 35 years; they have developed into an integral part of range of surgical options for treating end-stage heart failure. One-year-survival after heart transplantation is 80 - 85 %, and 73 % of patients are still alive with reasonable quality of life 5 years following surgery.

The transplant procedure starts with the enrollment into a transplant program and the consecutive waiting period for an appropriate donor organ after adequate evaluation of the patient as a suitable candidate. This waiting period, in which the disease will often deteriorate, may be rather long. Patients experience that “final” stage of their disease quite differently, as the waiting time may be either smooth or very dramatic. Accordingly, patients cope with that time in different ways, depending on whether they realize the seriousness of their condition or not. As a consequence, many patients are not only in bad physical shape, but are also psychologically impaired at the time of transplantation [8].

Also, the transplant procedure itself is difficult to bear for the patient. Many patients have revealed that this undoubtedly extreme experience should not only be considered from a medical point of view but also from the psychological aspect - heart transplantation is not a single event; rather, it is a long-lasting process [22].

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