Cardiac Allograft Vasculopathy

Cardiac allograft vasculopathy (CAV) is a common complication affecting heart transplant patients. This condition causes narrowing of the heart arteries leading to graft dysfunction. Surveillance for CAV is vital; however an ideal approach has not been established. The goal of this study is to assess whether noninvasive positron emission tomography (PET) based surveillance is non-inferior to invasive coronary angiography (ICA) surveillance.

Cardiac allograft vasculopathy is a common complication affecting heart transplant patients. This condition causes narrowing of the heart arteries leading to graft dysfunction. The research team is investigating whether early antiplatelet therapy post heart transplant can prevent the development of CAV. This study will determine the feasibility of a large multicenter randomized placebo-controlled trial to answer this question.

In traditional coronary artery disease, patients often experience symptoms such as angina. However, heart transplant patients lack nerve connections in the transplanted heart and therefore usually do not notice any symptoms. For this reason, routine examinations are performed using traditional coronary angiography at one, three, and six years after transplantation, sometimes with the addition of coronary ultrasound. A new technique, photon-counting computed tomography, has now been developed and may potentially replace both traditional coronary angiography and intravascular ultrasound. In this study, we aim to investigate how well this method works in diagnosing coronary artery changes compared to the established methods.

The aim of the study is to evaluate the impact of early microvascular disease assessed by coronary physiologic indices such as fractional flow reserve (FFR), coronary flow reserve (CFR), index of microvascular resistance (IMR) on future occurrence of cardiac allograft vasculopathy (CAV) in heart transplant recipients.

The aim of the mCAV study is a comprehensive characterization of the genetic, morphological and functional phenotype of isolated microvascular graft vasculopathy (mCAV) after orthotopic heart transplantation (OHT). The utilized methods include dynamic echocardiography, magnetic resonance imaging, invasive microvascular resistance measurements, histology, cellular calcium-signaling and magnetocardiography as well as molecular genetic expression analysis (miRNA based).