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by msrenee 1570 days ago
The Wikipedia page cites a documentary as the source, which may be correct, but doesn't seem like an appropriate source. Here's a paper that I skimmed the abstract of claiming ~9 years:

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15280687/
2 comments
MPSimmons 1570 days ago
I don't know what the documentary source is, but this paper is from 2004, and it's likely that procedures have improved reliability since then.
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maewsa 1570 days ago
Documentary cited is from 2007 so that's a marked improvement for 2-3 years...

I'd personally lean towards trusting published medical journal.

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sobren 1570 days ago
Here's a 2015 article from the Journal of Thoratic Disease. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4387387/.It doesn't calculate the exact average, but 21% of patients are alive after 20 years. Survival rates have definitely rapidly increased over the last two decades.

> Survival after heart transplantation is excellent, particularly if it is compared with the natural course of end-stage HF. The most recent data of the registry of the International Society of Heart and Lung Transplantation indicates a current 1-year survival of 84.5% and a 5-year survival of 72.5% (5). This has significantly improved as compared to the 76.9% 1-year survival and 62.7% 5-year survival in the 1980s. The development of new immunosuppressive drugs which allow a variety of immunosuppressive regimens, tailored to the individual patient, has contributed to this success, since rejection and the adverse effects of immunosuppression could be better controlled. After 20 years, ca. 21% of patients are still alive, according to the international registry (5). In some experienced centers, long-term survival is reported to be even higher (6-9). The University Hospital Zurich has achieved a 20-year survival rate of 55.6% (10).

>The improvement in outcome over the decades is related mainly to an increase in survival over the first year. After this period, the attrition rate of ca. 3-4% per year has remained similar over the different eras. This might be attributable to the fact that it was not possible to reduce the incidence of long-term complications after heart transplantation, such as chronic allograft vasculopathy (CAV) and malignancies, which account for ca. 35% of all deaths after 10 to 15 years (5).

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