Cardiac transplantation at Stanford.

Increasing survival of cardiac allograft recipients has been noted with each year of the Stanford cardiac transplantation program. Current 1 year survival is 67%, compared with 22% 1 year survival in the first year of our program. Five factors are felt to be important in improving survival: 1 degree stringent recipient selection criteria, 2 degrees routine use of serial endomyocardial biopsies for the diagnosis of acute graft rejection, 3 degrees administration of rabbit antithymocyte globulin for the treatment of rejection, 4 degrees aggressive diagnosis and treatment of infectious complications, and 5 degrees reduction of the incidence of accelerated graft arteriosclerosis by appropriate prophylaxis.