Combined Heart and Liver Transplantation: The Asan Medical Center Experience

Abstract

Combined heart-liver transplantation (CHLT) is an increasingly accepted treatment for select patients with advanced heart and liver disease. However, CHLT are infrequently performed, despite growing optimism about their effectiveness. Here, we report Asan Medical Center experience with CHLT in three patients presenting with advanced heart and liver failure. One patient died of brain swelling because of intractable hyperammonemia on postoperative day 9. The two other patients were still alive at 53 and 9 months postsurgery. None of these patients required readmission for cardiac or hepatic graft dysfunction and no rejection episodes were detected on routine cardiac biopsies. This is the first report of CHLT cases from Korea.