Association of high-priority exceptions with waitlist mortality among heart transplant candidates.

ABSTRACT:

Background

The US heart allocation system ranks candidates using six categorical status levels. Transplant programs can request exceptions to increase a candidate's status level if they believe their candidate has the same medical urgency as candidates who meet the standard criteria for that level. We aimed to determine if exception candidates have the same medical urgency as standard candidates.

Methods

Using the Scientific Registry of Transplant Recipients, we constructed a longitudinal waitlist history dataset of adult heart-only transplant candidates listed between October 18, 2018 and December 1, 2021. We estimated the association between exceptions and waitlist mortality with a mixed-effects Cox proportional hazards model that treated status and exceptions as time-depe

SUBMITTER: Johnson DY 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC10524782 | biostudies-literature | 2023 Sep

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature