A new study found that a method of heart transplantation known as donations after circulatory death (DCD), which uses machines to reanimate donor hearts from people who have died, is just as good as traditional heart transplantation.
The study published in the New England Journal of Medicine noted that the adjusted six-month survival rate of patients undergoing the new method was 94%, compared with 91% among patients who underwent the traditional method.
The study included 180 participants, with 90 patients in each group. Not only did patients in the DCD group have equivalent — if not better — survival outcomes, they also received their transplants slightly faster, waiting on average 24 days compared with 31 days for patients in the traditional group.
Read more about this potentially groundbreaking advancement here.